Yesterday while reading Instapundit, I came across a mention that beyond all the rest, it was almost impossible for Obamacare to be useful to the people it claimed to most want to be useful to: the uninsured who live at the margins of society, unable to take advantage of any other mechanism for getting medical treatment.
In fact, a doctor who is an Instapundit reader, wrote in to point out that his uninsured patients lived unorganized, confused lives and were definitely not self motivated. They were certainly not driven enough to stick with it through a highly complex process involving complicated information.
Look, it’s not just that there are people who… well… look, guys, we’ve been very wealthy (as a country and by historical norms) for very long. We’ve allowed people to survive and thrive who could not have made it at any other time in history.
And no, I’m not talking stupid people. Heaven help us. A lot of them are very smart people. In fact, a lot of them are “our” people – odds all.
It’s just that they’re not really interested in the stuff of everyday life. I bet you anything if Leonardo DaVinci were alive today he would be one of those people who aren’t very organized, certainly not organized enough to fill in all the papers in the way the bureaucracy thinks he should.
Look, guys, I’ll be blunt – between the writing, the job, and the other stuff we did, sometimes we had trouble enough doing things like fill in the paperwork for the kids’ field trips. In fact we had so much trouble with that – those of you who have small kids know what it’s like for the family to go three separate directions at once, and a fourth direction to keep up with school, and then…– that as soon as the kids could be trusted, I taught them to forge my signature, so that when they found themselves stranded and I’d forgotten to sign the form, or they’d forgotten to give it to me, they wouldn’t be the only kids left out of the field trip or the movie, or whatever. (Yes, I trusted them. When they were eight or so.)
Our taxes get done every year, but every year it’s a major effort, what with three businesses (soon to be four) flying under the family flagship and income from odd sources (well, comics, you know, and books, and bookkeeping, and…)
And we’re relatively well organized for Odds, and we discipline ourselves to do things.
Most of our kind, let’s face it, is just not very good at this organization thing. And then there are people who are genuinely not good at paperwork, and people who aren’t that literate, and people who just… well… aren’t all there. This is before you get to the not-very-smart.
This is not about Obamacare, specifically, though it is part of the problem – the problem is this – we seem to be living in a society where those who would control our movements and our activities expect all of us to be as fond of filling up paperwork as they are of coming up with paperwork to be filled.
We are living in a society where you can get fined – and worse – because you failed to dot every I and cross every T.
Perhaps the greatest failure of imagination on the part of those who would be our betters is their failure to imagine that the rest of us don’t live for rules, regulations or the filing of the appropriate paperwork.
Schools are guilty of this, and I remember when they started penalizing the boys – in elementary – for not remembering to turn in something. The teacher didn’t remind them, because the six and seven year old boys were supposed to remember. It was part of their training, the teachers said.
And it’s true. It was training in fulfilling irrational orders.
The problem – the bureaurcats’ and ours – is that I think they’re headed for massive non-compliance.
We weren’t the only parents who had trouble getting the kids’ paperwork filled for school. And we aren’t the only small business owners struggling to find time to do our taxes properly. And we’re not – not even close to – the busiest or most unorganized of our acquaintance.
I know, I know, the multiplication of bureaucracy and penalties for non-compliance is a way to have something on EVERYONE and to enforce the law arbitrarily. I know this.
The thing is, each level of bureaucracy added – and taking over health care is a massive level – adds more complexity and more difficulty in complying.
I think if we’re not there, we’re nearing the point at which NO ONE can even pretend to comply – certainly not with everything and probably not with most of it.
This is the point at which compliance goes nominal, or not even that.
A lot of the people these laws supposedly would help, simply cannot fulfill the paperwork requirements. They can’t. That’s all.
I have an image in mind of a massive bureaucratic machine demanding to be fed more and more information, even as it gets caught in the gears and tears them apart.
I understand the DDR towards the end was collecting more information than anyone could process, and I suspect the same was true for the other Eastern block countries.
It’s a fact little appreciated that to achieve the sort of control in 1984, you’d need one on one bureaucrats to citizens. And even then, the citizen might not be able to comply. Not if he has another job beyond bureaucracy.
In the future we’re free because demands of the statists outstrip their ability to enforce them.
Talk about a system collapsing under its own weight.
Maybe, like those detailed cities in the jungle that one day were left behind and abandoned for no reason we can understand, one day the edifice of bureaucracy, having outstripped its ability to function due to ravenous overreach into our lives, will be left standing and empty, while we, free men, simply walk away.
UPDATE: Different post over at Mad Genius Club. Writing with Found Objects, first installment
According To Hoyt 
I don’t know… I agree that there’s a combinatoric growth here: the amount of information tracked grows until it outstrips the ability to track it. But on the other hand, computers serve as a massive amplifier in tracking ability (healthcare.gov notwithstanding). The combinatoric growth still wins in the end, but the computers drastically prolong the collapse.
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I think Healthcare.goof indicates that although computers serve as a massive amplifier in tracking, they also are immune to political suasion. Leviathan has its procurement rules and cronies must be enriched. And the cronies who can navigate procurement shoals are not necessarily competent to do the things we take for granted of Apple, Google, et al.
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You’re quite right. And as computers become more powerful and more flexible, they will add to the burden that we are capable of bearing – technically. Then, I predict the fail will come when the psychology of the people cannot bear it any more.
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Except — I live with a computer person — this is not as obvious as it seems. The more you add the complexity the more things drop/go wrong, even in computers.
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To an extent, that’s true, but once the failure is detected, someone goes in and corrects for that problem, and, if they’re any good, they add enough capability to catch and correct several other potential problems that were brought to light by that one. The main saving grace there will probably be that these people deal with their cronies, who have to be spoon-fed from the Government coffers, because they are incompetent, and could not survive in the real world of business.
As I told the trolls on my FB post yesterday comparing the Obamacare website to this cartoon I had seen, I and the three other guys in my department could have built a site that actually functioned, and for about 1% of the cost (including hardware).
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I and the three other guys in my department could have built a site that actually functioned, and for about 1% of the cost (including hardware).
Ack! Sir! Don’t say things like that! Torching my oil, again…over half a billion dollars flushed!! Exclamatory punctuation!!
I knew this would inevitably be true, not solely as a result of inherent government inefficiency. But hearing it from tech people…Ack!
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“over half a billion dollars flushed”??? Nonsense. That money went to good and noble purpose, helping the friends of this Administration and friends of this Administration always give help back. You overlook the fundamental purpose of the
spendinginvestments. One hand cannot wash the other without wasting a little soft soap, after all.LikeLike
You surely have a calloused cheek and brawny tongue.
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Yes, but the fixes can also contain bugs.
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Not can, will.
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“once the failure is detected, someone goes in and corrects for that problem” — sometimes. If the budget allows, and there’s sufficient interest in maintaining the old stuff instead of creating more new stuff. And the tester was good enough a salesman to make the problem seem important, from a business or mission sense…
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And when all of this is run with government efficiency…
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Yes, see my qualifier about it being handled by cronies.
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I’ve been wondering how many little back-doors and info taps are in the original code for the ACA site and connections, and how many more will be in once they start “fixing” the code.
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I dunno — how many “Navigators” are there?
Seriously — they have people giving their name, address & social security numbers to unlicensed, uncertified, unbonded and untrained ACORN hires? Gee, what could possibly go wrong?
I truly don’t understand the GOP House’s failure to pass a bill requiring all Obamacare navigators be certified & bonded & insured as a public protection measure. They really must be “Teh Stupid Party.” Mayhap I ought write my congresscritter a note recommending that little precaution.
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I understand it. The idea is to not fix Obamacare, that way there’s no way the vile progs can blame the failures on GOP fixes, or throw up the tu quoque fallacy whenever Republicans tried to dismatle it. I, for one, am glad that the effort to defund Obamacare failed.
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Wayne, I certainly believe you could have coded it, tested it and brought it up, and for orders of magnitude less outlay (as long as you were given a realistic appreciation of loads and all the interconnects with legacy government systems – which apparently did not inform the current incarnation), but I doubt you and your team would be able to (nor want to) try and fix the 500,000,000 lines of code in the current monstrosity, especially as it has to be kept running (for given values of ‘running’) and can’t be brought down for very long to make changes. Also, somehow I doubt that much code produced under the pressures being reported is very well documented.
Five Hundred Million Lines of poorly documented, rushed code.
In one of my jobs I ran a software development team responsible for a business-critical system of around 3 million lines of code with a reasonably complex database underneath. It worked and was supportable as long as there was some continuity in the team supporting it. Once they RIF’d me and my team, it was not. They burned through the fellow they had overseeing the “buy something new and make it work” replacement effort in about 9 months of 80 hour weeks, spent a huge amount of money on the “:off the shelf” thingee they bough that didn’t do what our system did, and from what I hear still had to code up a huge amount of custom stuff to make it sort-of work.
It took them about 18 months to get to that sort-of working condition.
Even with my experience, I cannot begin to comprehend the massive mess that John "Hannibal" Smith and the rest of the A-team are going to have in trying to "fix" this 500 million lines of code monstrosity.
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With all due respect to Wayne: no, he couldn’t do it. No one could. The project was doomed to fail by virtue of how the decisions were made. Not even starting to define the requirements until March of this year, changing the requirements up to and through the deadline, contradictory requirements with political and legal consequences for every misstep, and bullheaded adherence to the deadline made this project impossible from the start. Wayne would’ve been smart enough to see the disaster coming and abandon ship long before the blamestorming began.
This was not a technology failure, that’s just a side effect. This was a management and administration failure.
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When I heard Sibelius complain that they only had three years to do this project and really needed five, my first thought was “Why didn’t it get planned for five, then, you !@#&$^^$%? When has a project of this scale ever come in on time, under budget and with no more than a few ‘glitches’?”
My second thought was “No, because you !@#&$^^$%!s were playing hide the salami with critical rules to avoid their becoming political plutonium, so if you had another two years you’d have just played hide the salami longer because there would have been yet another election. This !@#&$^^$%! had to come out in the off year to avoid hemlocking all of your party’s candidates and half the invulnerable ones.”
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Hmm… that’s a detail I wasn’t aware of. I had thought it had been under construction a lot longer. I was considering at least a two year time frame.
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From what I read, requirements didn’t start emerging until March because there was concern over how the requirements would be perceived politically. All politics aside, this reads like an archetypal example of how to screw up a project/
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It ain’t that bad … yet. A Google on the phrase healthcare.gov AND “new coke” turned up a mere 570,000 hits.
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It’s worse than you know. It’s a SNAFUBAR project.
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You mean “We don’t know it’s that bad … yet.” My prediction is it’s worse, but we won’t find out just how bad for years. Case studies will be written about this mess. If I were to go through my software engineering textbooks and gather a list of the top 25 mistakes that sink a project, they would sound like an outline of the healthcare.gov project. Starting with the deadline first is #1 on that list.
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Well, there was a reason I chose New Coke as the baseline. To be fair, there was no effort to require us to buy New Coke and I don’t recall the president of Coca~Cola ever giving a performance so pathetic as Obama’s last Monday. That one was approaching “I am not a crook” territory.
Still, what difference, at this point, does it make??
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That last line. I want it to be her last words. And I want to be there to hear her say them. Then I shove her head under water again until the bubbles stop coming up.
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Can I hold your towel?
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Obamacare website may be the only thing to push Stephen Elop’s “Burning Platforms” memo to #2 in epic screwups.
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Weird. I hit your link and got a ‘mere’ 49,500 hits. Wonder what changed?
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Google’s search-result approximations are essentially meaningless, and should not be relied on for anything. (But too many people do).
I remember a search I did maybe 9-10 years ago, where I saw an approximate-results figure in the thousands. Intrigued to find out exactly how many real results there were, I started clicking through result pages, and found there were only… something like 23 actual results.
Google doesn’t reveal their methodology, and I can’t remember the search term (the number of results would have changed by now anyway), so I can’t reproduce this. But I am positive that the number Google returns for “approximately X results” is a first-order SWAG at best.
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Five Hundred Million Lines of poorly documented, rushed code.
We talked about that at work today, and none of us believe that number. There hasn’t been time since the law was passed to write that many lines of code (and have it compile successfully). We suspect it’s using a lot of either purchased or copied (there IS that story about the section of code that is almost certainly copied from a public domain software package with attributions and the GPL License text removed) software as support modules, and that someone added all those together.
Still, it’s an unwieldy mess that will take a really long time to fix so that it is anywhere near functional.
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Well, to be that bloated it pretty much has to be choked full of un-optimized stolen code (To be fair, back in my coding days, I never wrote my own code where I could …ahem… recycle).
To give some sense of scale, the Chevy Volt’s on-board software build reportedly is around 10 million lines of source, the 787 avionics and onboard support software loadout is about 6.5 million lines, the F-22 software build is ~1.7 million lines of source, and a pacemaker is 80K lines.
[Lines of code numbers from a Coverity infographic available on Wired at: http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/the-new-industrial-revolution ]
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There’s nothing like pre-existing code to limit your ability to act.
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OK, did anyone else have this popping up in their minds as they read this thread? http://www.ovff.org/pegasus/songs/threes-rev-11.html
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I’d never seen that before, but it’s great.
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That’s awesome. I too had never seen it before, but I love it.
He’s right that it’s even funnier if you’ve heard the original. Many folks here will have heard it, but some won’t… so here’s the original version of Threes (well, a cover, since that’s a man singing it and not Leslie Fish, but it’s the original lyrics):
Enjoy.
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“And as computers become more powerful and more flexible, they will add to the burden that we are capable of bearing – technically.”
You guys are all assuming something I see assumed constantly on the internet; that everybody knows how to use a computer. A majority of the people I know do NOT use a computer, and a large portion (probably just a sizable minority, not a majority) do not even know HOW to use a computer. Governments run into this constantly, they keep wanting to lower their workload by making citizens have to do stuff online, then have to backtrack and come up with an alternative because I sizeable portion of the population either doesn’t have or have easy access to an internet connected computer, or they don’t know how to use it, and have no interest in learning. This will be another reason for the ‘massive non-compliance’ Sarah mentions. Make something people don’t really want to do to difficult to do, and they simply aren’t going to do it.
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Oh, I never assume people know how to use a computer, as far as the general public are concerned. I spent 7 years on a helpdesk (and this was tech support for corporation employees, not public end-users, and still the stupid burned- YOU try to walk a Front Desk Clerk at a hotel through rebuilding the RAID Array on their local server when you have to have them read the prompts on the screen to you so you can have an idea what you’re doing. *shudder*).
No, what I am assuming, with justification, is that computers will be programmed to be more and more user-friendly (for certain values of ‘friendly’), and to be able to keep up with more and more of the workload of filing and document-storing, and reminding people when it’s time to do the things that need to be done. Plus, the people who are part of maintaining the compliance with regulations DO know how to use computers, or else they wouldn’t have that kind of job.
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“The cup holder on my computer broke.”
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I only heard that one as a joke, but I have had a power strip plugged into itself, a network hub plugged into itself, and any number of people who denied having a floppy disk in the drive when they were getting a “Non-System Disk or Disk Error” message on the screen. And one guy I worked with swore that he once got the “I can’t tell if my computer is plugged in because the power’s out and the lights are off” call one day.
I got tricky on the ones with the floppy in the drive, though. I told them that sometimes the sensor in the drive gets stuck and they needed to put a disk in and eject it again to reset it.
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I got tricky on the ones with the floppy in the drive, though. I told them that sometimes the sensor in the drive gets stuck and they needed to put a disk in and eject it again to reset it.
The standard “try unplugging it and plugging it back in again” advice comes from a similar source: getting the user to make sure the power plug is well-seated, without getting the indignant “Of course I’ve checked that it’s plugged in! What do you think I am, stupid?!?” (The level of indignation in the response is, naturally, proportional to the probability of the device actually being unplugged after all.)
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To be fair, it’s possible for a plug to get kicked or work its way out of the outlet just enough to cut off power, while still appearing to be plugged in. I know, because I’ve done it!
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When we lived in California at the height of the computer boom there (I’m not certain that this was the dot.com one, but mid-to-late 90’s when salaries were ridiculous and I’d get 3 or more cold-calls from head hunters every week even though my husband hadn’t put his resume in any public place for years..) we’d go down to Oakland to pay… gosh, electric, I think… at the main offices so that we wouldn’t get our power turned off. The line was full of other computer nerds just like him doing exactly what he was doing making the money he was making, there to make sure their power wasn’t turned off.
Not stupid, not poor, but next to unable to take care of basic bodily functions once work was done taking what it took, (the pony-tail and goatee isn’t a fashion statement, it’s a “who has time to get your hair cut” statement), to the extent that we’d joke that if someone was *bathed* regularly they were on top of their game.
I don’t know if it’s an illusion that life is more complicated now, but it seems to be. There are more things to keep track of and be organized about. Or at least it seems that way. Do people who can’t keep up, really need more things to have to keep up with?
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Electronic banking’s saved my credit rating, lol. The money was THERE, it was just a matter of remembering where the bills were, the stamps were, the checkbook and the like… then actually remembering to DO it regularly.
Now it’s “Okay, let me set this up for automatic payment… done.” If it can’t be set up for automatic payment direct from my bank account, I make it a recurring charge on a credit card (and get points! Win-win!) and pay THAT.
Love living in the future – indeed I do…
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My father used to forget to deposit his paychecks, for a month or more at a time. Drove my mom crazy. It wasn’t as though they were wealthy; they were both teachers. It’s just a good thing they were frugal and had never even heard of debt.
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“I don’t know if it’s an illusion that life is more complicated now, but it seems to be.”
I was asking a much older relative about that just the other day. We’re both old enough to remember live before the computer revolution and the internet. It isn’t so much the computer as a device, it’s the networking that uses the computer to reach me wherever I am, at any moment. Officially, I’m not supposed to have to deal with office matters on my own time, but unofficially I can’t meet some of the deadlines if I don’t. Yes, I remember my father working late into the night at his job, but his job couldn’t follow him on an out-of-town vacation via email like mine — back when I could get enough consecutive days off to take an out-of-town vacation.
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Simple solution to that, don’t check your email when on vacation.
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My first business world job after college was at a nuclear power consulting company, where I worked with gazillion-dollar-an-hour billable-rate nuclear engineering consultants whose wives had to come in every month or so and search through their husbands desks to locate and retrieve undeposited paychecks.
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Shortly after he married, G. K. Chesterton told his bank to stop honoring his signature — to honor only his wife’s. She gave him an allowance, and if he appeal for special circumstances, sometimes a bit more. That’s how he managed.
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Wow. Bureaucracy = collapse into dystopia?
The UK Health system, whilst nowhere near perfect, works fairly well. Are the Obamacare panel using that as a template, or devising a completely new system?
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A) the UK health system does not work fairly well and its issues are mounting. B) Obamacare is a screaming mess in a country much bigger and with completely different laws.
C) You have no idea how much paperwork we’re already under. D) assume anything you read overseas about the health system we HAVE/HAD is wrong.
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Provided that you have no objections to patients starving to death in the hospital, the UK Health system works fairly well.
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Actually I wasn’t talking about collapse into dystopia, either, and I’m amazed he thought that. I was talking about government collapse, while society goes on. Pfui. shows his biases. No government = dystopia.
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Well, duh. You notice how they ignore that the sequester is still going on?
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I’m really tired of people repeating this c**p about the NHS. It has its problems as does your system, and yes there have been isolated instances of establishments in which incompetence, mismanagement and negligence have combined to result in appalling neglect of patients. But that is not widespread or endemic as some of the sensaitonalist media would have you believe. I and my family can testify from personal experience to the high quality and responsiveness of the healthcare provided by our local doctors and our local and regional hospitals. That is much more representative of the NHS as a whole than the negative spin provided by the ant-NHS brigade.
What is far more widespread, but you probably haven’t read about because it is less widely publicised is the apalling maltreatment,neglect,and in many cases outright abuse ,of elderly people in residential care provided by the private sector. Unfortunately it appears that maltreatment is widespread because the owners of these establishments routinely subordinate standards of care and patient welfare to their search for profit.
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Melvin, sorry, but b*llsh*t. I grew up with a socialized system. Not only does it suck, but complaints are muted by the force of the government. Enough complaints are breaking out about the NHS and its results are so poor even with the manipulated statistics (premature babies don’t count for deaths!) that there is no hiding the mess it is.
As for private, heartless operators in search of vile “profit.” Sure, they exist. BUT they can be brought to rein by simply not buying their product.
You want abuse of the elderly? Sure. Put it in the hands of functionaries you can’t stop buying from and who will not be punished for what they do.
In the US I must ask — does anyone want the people who screwed with the IRS in charge of your health? Because they will be. Anything that’s controlled by government is controlled by bureaucracy.
With all due respect, your opinion sounds like it’s informed by a main-stream press eager — as always — for big government solutions.
I bet in Portugal the press also says the nationalized health works “pretty well” but no one — NO ONE — with money enough to go private will use it.
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I use ours for some things, the private system for some other things, paid by my employer (except for things which have direct impact on our working ability we are recommended to use the general, tax supported system, but since it can work so slowly… and yes, the firm does get tax subsidies for providing health care, plus they also have to since we are talking about a big, mostly government owned firm). The differences are rather noticeable. And even with the employer paid health care, well, I don’t get as good service as I would if it was something I could pay for personally since they are supposed to be frugal with us.
Everybody who can afford to pay the private clinics and doctors usually does. You rarely end sitting in the waiting room for hours with a child who’s screaming his head off with the pain from an ear infection on that side. Or have to wait months for your appointment.
As said, if even a wealthy country with only five million people can’t get that type of system to work well…
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Sarah, I would like to reply to you and the others who have jumped on me for this but I can’t do that tonight as I’m getting ready to fly off to see my duaghter and grandchildren in Sweden in the morning, and some commenters have demanded citations which I’ll have to go and dig out. So I’d be grateful for a couple of days grace.
In the meantime I’d make a couple of points in reply to your comments. I know your very strong view about the evils of socialism , and I don’t entirely disagree. However with respect the Portugal of your youth is not the UK of today, and your experience of a socialist military dictatorship in 1970s Portugal is not necessarily relevant to the situation vis a vis the NHS in the UK in 2013.
Similarly the suggestion that you simply don’t buy services from bad providers is too simplistic. First you have to be able to differentiate the good from the bad, which may not be easy in itself, and secondly you have to have an affordable choice in n appropriate location which is not guaranteed either. (And of course that suggestion presupposes that you have the capacity to make an informed and reasoned choice which unfortunately many of the elderly people in question do not.)
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With respect, I have friends and family in Portugal and the UK, I go back regularly and am in touch every week. My only family in the US is the family I made. Bully for you that you haven’t got the really bad stuff happen to you yet with NHS. Almost everyone else has.
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Great. Well, since Americans can’t be trusted to make informed choices, our betters have made them for us. For instance, they have decided that it’s not wise for us to carry high-deductible insurance policies. My $10K deductible doesn’t pass muster under the new law, so Blue Cross is being forced by the ACA to discontinue it. In exchange, my brand-new policy will have a $6,000 deductible. Yay? Not so fast: it will cost me $4,800 a year more in premiums.
“If you like your coverage you can keep it” was a stinking lie. My coverage was destroyed for no good reason by the new law. The affordable coverage I prefer no longer can be offered to me legally by Blue Cross or any other insurance company. My choices are: pay $4,800 a year to be protected against the danger that my medical bills will be more than $6,000 but less than $10,000, or go bare and wait until I get sick before I sign up for new coverage. Brilliant. Thanks, Mr. President. Thanks, Congress. Thanks, Democratic voters who put these benevolent clowns into office so they could protect me from evil profiteers and bend that cost curve down.
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Naturally our leaders think Americans can’t be trusted to make informed choices — look who we elect.
“If you like your coverage you can keep it” was a stinking lie and a self-evident one: every insurance policy is renewed annually, meaning you don’t get to keep your current coverage no matter how much you like it; what you get to do is replace it with comparable coverage … if the insurance regulators allow.
Same with keeping your current doctor — I expect most of us rely on healthcare clinics or practices, none of whom promise to keep you with a single doctor (although, and for good reason, they make an effort to.) The clinician who diagnosed and treated my Diabetes took ill and was unavailable for over a year — the practice assigned me a replacement. Nothing president Obama could do would have allowed me to keep my (then) current doctor.
When a politician makes a promise that is on its face unkeepable you can be pretty sure everything else being sold in that package will prove far less shiny when the wrapping comes off.
TANSTAAFL
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Naturally our leaders think Americans can’t be trusted to make informed choices — look who we elect.
That… that’s unfortunately true. I don’t understand it. I don’t like it. I’m not sure what can be done until the whole thing crashes down around someone’s ears.
At which point the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth will commence with a “where’s the government to help us?” Oy vey.
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What can be done? Well, we could try running conservative candidates. Not more conservative than the Democrats, but actual conservatives. In 1984 Reagan damn near won every. single. state. Since then we’ve run two Bushes, two “moderate” senators, and a moderate former blue-state goveror. Only the Buses won, the first by riding on Reagan’s coattails and the second essentially tied Al freaking Gore, only winning reelection on the backs of national security voters.
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I take some small comfort in the junior Senator from my great state of Texas. But we need more.
And he needs shoring up, because the knives are out on both sides of the aisle and in the press.
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Where in TX are you Zach? I’m in DFW.
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Fighting the good fight here in Austin.
Blue lake in a red state and all that, but some cuckoo crazy stuff coming out of San Antonio so we may have a fun for our money.
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The past few elections haven’t been about Democrats vs. Republicans, they’ve been internecine fights between Republicans. I predict (hope?) that after 2014 Cruz will have quite a bit more support, and the 2016 primary will feature a battle between Cruz, Paul, and Perry. And when the winner of that fight wins everything between New Jersey and California I’ll watch MSNBC on a loop.
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I don’t believe Cruz can run for President, wasn’t he born in Canada?
Oh, and I agree with you on running conservative candidates, note that the Bushes were the two MOST conservative candidates since Reagan and the only two to win.
Don’t get to excited yet though, McCain is talking about running again, and the progressive leadership of the GOP will likely pull strings to try and get him nominated rather than a having even a moderate conservative.
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I don’t believe Cruz can run for President, wasn’t he born in Canada?
American parents.
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He was born in Canada of an American citizen mother over the age of 18. IF they DARE bring that birther stuff, we’ll talk about their godking. First I want them to prove he was born and not spawned.
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Got a good man running for the retiring Harkin’s seat here in Iowa – Sam Clovis. He’s a 25 year Air Force veteran and currently the token conservative history professor at a small liberal arts college.
If anyone wanted to check out his website or even, finances permitting, support him: iowans4samclovis.com
We need a Cicero – Cruz and Lee could use the help.
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bearcat: I don’t believe Cruz can run for President, wasn’t he born in Canada?
Foxfier: American parents.
One American parent; the other was not yet naturalized.
According to some Constitutional literalists (including a co-worker of mine who’s done extensive reading on the subject), that puts Cruz in the same category as me (I was born overseas to American parents). That category is “naturalized at birth”, as opposed to “natural-born citizen”, which (they claim) the Founders would have understood to only include citizens born on the country’s territory and not overseas. (See Blackstone and the concept of “natural-born subjects”, the argument does). But I subscribe to the common-sense reading of the “natural-born citizen” clause which means “someone who was a citizen at his/her birth, by virtue of the citizenship laws that applied at the time of his/her birth, and who did not have to take any extra steps to become a citizen.” Under that reading, both I and Cruz would count as natural-born citizens.
To add fuel to the debate, the Naturalization Act of 1790 is the only statute ever to define the term “natural-born citizen”! It said that children born abroad of U.S. citizen parents, as long as their father had (at some point in his life) been resident in the U.S., were citizens at birth and were to be considered as “natural-born citizens”. The Naturalization Act of 1790 was repealed and replaced by the Naturalization Act of 1795, which did not include any language about “natural-born citizens”, so a key qualification for the U.S. Presidency is now utterly unclear.
We really need a Constitutional amendment to define the term, or strike it and replace it with non-ambiguous language.
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It seems pretty straightforward to me. A natural-born citizen is someone who is born a citizen, as opposed to a naturalized citizen.
All of this sea-lawyering is just people trying to attack political opponents when they are unable to attack their positions.
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Ah. I was born an American citizen. Not my fault it was in Portugal. SULK.
I want PROOF Obama is or ever has been more American than I.
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You were born an American. Through a cruel twist of fate you were not born a US citizen. Obama is rather the opposite: born a citizen, but is not, was not, and probably never will be an American.
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With some objections for things like “born of those who weren’t legally allowed there” (would YOU believe Random Guy In Mexico #47 holding an American birth certificate and saying “surely, this is me– my parents went back to Mexico a year later. See, I have official Mexican documents proving it– the ink is nearly dry!”) and “official representatives of other countries” (It just Doesn’t Work for the Whatzistan Ambassador’s daughter to run for president, even if she was born in the US and grew up here) you have a point.
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The issue is the power balance between the “country club” wing of the stupid party and what used to be the Reagan wing, but really is just everyone else, now including the libertarian infiltrators like Rand Paul. When the country club wing holds sway we get annointed nominees like Romney or McCain or Dole, or the Bush consecutancy, or Gerald Ford. When the other side wins out we get Reagan.
At this point I think the CC wing is losing, but I thought that after 2010 and yet we got Mittens, and that and the IRS gave us what we have now.
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In 2012 the Tea Party was less than 4 years old. I thought it rather premature to think that a movement that young would be able to influence a national party to the extent of determining the Presidential candidate, though I see Ryan’s pick for VP as a nod toward that wing. We’re stronger now, witness the latest shutdown, and I think after 2014 we’ll be stronger still.
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Re: Jeff Gauch’s comment –
All of this sea-lawyering is just people trying to attack political opponents when they are unable to attack their positions.
FWIW, the co-worker I mentioned, who claims that being born overseas of American parents doesn’t qualify you as a “natural-born citizen”, is a staunch conservative, who is wholly in favor of what Cruz seems to be trying to do as a Senator. So his Constitutional objections, at least, are based on principles and not on politics.
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I meant to include another group: those who constructed these convoluted definitions to attack an opponent and then had the intellectual honesty to stick to them when they applied to an ally.
And of course there are the large number of people who haven’t given the issue much thought and just repeat what a trusted source says.
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IIRC, the “even born to citizens when out-of-country” version is from English Law– it’s kind of like how an Embassy is “really” part of the country it’s representing. Traditionally, Ambassadors’ families were covered with the “officially representing” thing, and the kids of those occupying armies who were allowed to have families, but there’s a blessed reason that the law at the time of Obama’s birth had a thing about living in the US for XYZ amount of time after reaching adulthood.
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Yes, but the left has been doing battlespace preparation. There is no constitutional objection. TRULY. Natural born means you’re a citizen at birth. This is the scat thrown by the same people who wouldn’t let us question where the godking might have been spawned.
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That’s the thing. In all the ways that matter, Sarah IS more American than the guy that is in the office. She understands the founding fathers’ intent, she likes our history and institutions, and she hasn’t been raised by people who were constantly telling her that the USA is the source of all evil in the world.
Being a USAian (and MAN I wish that flowed off the tongue better) is a state of mind and heart, a disposition towards individual liberty and away from statism. It’s a belief that individuals making their own choices for themselves will exhibit more wisdom than a bunch of central planners, no matter HOW much information those planners may have.
That’s what we need – as many USAian people as we can get, in all levels and in all offices. And we need them, like, yesterday.
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Wow! Apparently I should have added a /sarc/ tag to that bit of snark before I posted it.
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I won’t ask for gov’t help if I can possibly avoid it.
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For my small part in the discussion, real life intrudes and I’m cool with that. Enjoy the visit with the progeny, family is to be cherished.
As to your “don’t buy services from bad providers” paragraph, there is validity in those points, but the assumed solution in government is what leaves me cold. While individuals may have difficulty evaluating specific services, aggregated individuals do quite well. Information propagation speeds the feedback process significantly. And aggregated evaluation of goods and services is essential for everything in modern society. We cannot all be experts on everything. And no government agency can be expert on the needs of all citizens. So they target the mean, at best.
As to the second point, I’ll say that the U.S. may have some experience with a distributed population and rural pop density vs service provision difficulties. And some notion of how the government chooses to solve that problem. (Think: centralization for ‘efficiency.’) In a market based system, individuals have the option of paying more for localized service or paying more to travel for service or devising a different solution entirely. Service provision to low pop density areas incurs additional costs, and requires a different business plan than provision to high pop density areas. Wal-Mart has figured out a solution, I’m pretty sure deregulated medical providers could do so as well. (I have several ideas that require the AMA to ease up, but they don’t seem inclined to play along) By contrast, in a government based system those decisions will be made by bureaucrats based on things other than the individual’s wants/needs.
I think the big disconnect I have, many living with centralized healthcare are quite happy and see no reason to knock it. Simply because the system will service most folks adequately well, and they have no strong incentive to pursue other options at greater expense. But those few who have a markedly less pleasant experience? They have few options, are marginalized and counted as statistics (then massaged into non-existence). I really don’t want to be a statistic to some bureaucrat.
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Eamon, thanks for the reminder. Provided herewith a few simple facts:
Great Britain*….88,745 sq miles — 63.23 million people
Texas………….268,820 sq miles — 26.06 million people
Texas, while the largest continental US state, is yet a minor portion of the country (3.794 million sq miles) as a whole. People who have not been to the USA tend to be incapable of comprehending how far a twelve hour drive** won’t get you across the country. I s’pose Russians get it, possibly some Chinese. Aussies get it and maybe Canadians (although their country is of greater area, the vast majority of its population resides in a relatively narrow strip along their Southern border.
REGARDLESS of how well the NHS does or doesn’t work, there are significant differences of scale between the US and Britain, and those differences have consequences.
*Great Britain refers to England, Scotland, and Wales put together.
**Twelve hours at 60mph “as the crow flies” gets you from London to ANYWHERE in Britain with time to spare. In the USA it gets you from Washington DC to St. Louis. Almost.
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As a small (related) aside, I’m occasionally surprised by people who live in the U.S. but don’t really grasp the size. For instance, served with a fellow from Rhode Island. Until enlistment he’d spent his life in and around his home state. When he went to Texas for part of his training he was a bit boggled. I grew up in TX. I went on road trips in high school bigger than RI.
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During the year I lived in Columbus, OH, I met people who didn’t comprehend the size of Columbus, OH. worked further from my home (5 miles) than many of them had ever been in their lives. It was kind of scary.
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I’ve run into that overseas. I haven’t run into that Stateside. I’m gonna bump your ‘kinda’ to ‘really’ with repetition as a modifier.
Really, really scary.
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It’s why some of the most provincial people I’ve ever met are New Yorkers. They can do practically everything they would ever need to do in the space of a couple of islands. Some of them have no drive to look outside that little world.
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It’s worse than that Martin. Some folk never leave Manhattan and only a few miles of that.
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Huh, I’m driving 5 HOURS one way to where I’m working right now. And only driving through one town that I know* has a hospital during that five hour drive.
*It is possible a couple of the larger small towns I drive through have some sort of a small hospital, I know one at least has an emergency clinic.
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Oh, come on. Everybody knows Rhode Island is a special case. One time my dad and I looked for the highest point in the state, marked on the map and everything. It was an anthill on a flat road.
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Thank-you for letting me have the cow-pie in a pasture metaphor. (Oh, that’s the Capitol!)
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Never mind Texas. I live in Michigan, and my daily commute is longer than Rhode Island. That is one tiny state.
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who the hell drives at 60 mph on an interstate?
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Ballparked average figure for ease of calculation and to account for fact that don’t nobody drive East to West across West Virginia in a straight line. It also allows time to refuel and dump waste.
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I was thinking of Texas and other Western states. Montana has, I’ve been told, no daylight speed limit. If you drove at 60 mph it’d take you all day to drive from Dallas to Houston instead of a reasonable 4 hours (this is exclusive of all road stops.)
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Montana has no daytime speed limit, UNLESS marked. I have drove quite a bit in Montana (am driving there daily right now) and have only ever seen one or two roads that didn’t have a marked daytime speed limit.
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I don’t drive faster than that on I95 in Maryland, otherwise known as the MD state revenue collectors funding area. I’m not talking about tolls.
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The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions of the East coast are a special case. They are so highly population dense that you can’t drive faster 60 mph.
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I live in Connecticut and regularly drive over 60. Why, a lot of highways have a limit of 65!
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When I lived in NY I learned that while you might get away with 9 miles over the limit on the highway, going 10 miles over was a near certain ticket. This was in the days of the national 55 speed limit. Then we moved to CT and doing 9 miles over the limit on the Interstate got me folk tailgating me, flashing their lights at me, and giving me the finger – in the right lane! The mean speed on the Interstate was 80 with a 55 speed limit.
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If the weather is bad enough, or it’s ice coated, then I will drive 60 in the Interstate. I have this terrible allergy to pushing my vehicle out of bar ditches, and it causes my lead foot to grow lighter as the precipitation grows heavier. ;)
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It’s possible to drive from the northernmost point of Finland to the most southern in a day. Well, a summer day anyway. You are going to be damn sleepy towards the end, so I’d recommend stocking up heavily with coffee at some point, but it’s quite possible, and if you were to start soon after midnight (I said summer day – lets say when the sun rises around one in the morning :)) you’d probably manage to get even a few hours of sleep before the next midnight.
From the east border to the western seashore will take only a few hours.
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Maine to Florida is reported at 23 hours 56 mins, so I guess that can be done in a day. I think that is center of Maine (?) to center of Florida (Walt Disney World?) and don’t know whether that factors in stops for gas, elimination and possible back-ups at tolls (Looks like you’re taking the New Jersey Turnpike and paying tolls on I-95 in Maine, Massachusetts, Delaware & Maryland (delays depending on number of cars queued up at toll booyhs). G-d help you getting through Baltimore and DC on any kind of schedule.
On the plus side, you pretty much stay on Interstate 95 the entire way. Thanks, Ike!
If you want to go from Northernmost Maine (Estcourt Station) to Southernmost Florida (aka Key West) you’re gonna need a much longer day.
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From one corner to the other – NW Washington to Key West Florida – comes out at 3,643 road miles and 56 driving hours “in current traffic,” which strikes me as somewhat optimistic.
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If you haven’t driven for hours and seen only a couple of cars (not trucks) on the road you haven’t seen America.
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I’ve driven (ridden) for hours and seen no one. Blissful, that was.
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Just have to find the right roads, at the right time.
Highway 421 through Appalachia is great this time of year, what with the leaves changing and all. Just be careful if you are running the curves on a bike- there’s a couple of nasty descending radius turns that will sneak up on you if you don’t know the road yet.
Tight curves are definitely the way to go. Scenery’s nice, too. *grin*
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depending on your timing, you might rather skip I95. Like, around New York City.
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Google Maps claims that the drive from Denver Colorado to Las Vegas Nevada (look at a map of the US) is a couple minutes shy of 12 hours. But I usually can’t do it in less than 13 hours with a lunch stop and a couple of breaks to stretch my legs. And the last hour is murder at my age.
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Well, after two thousand the knees start to go.
Sigh. I’ve never been to vegas…
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Which is why Las Vegas is still standing …
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We drive down to my grandma-in-law’s place in San Diego every year or so, from the Seattle Blob. Leaving at about five, it takes roughly thirty hours with traffic and not-totally-insane stops, but not stopping to eat in a restaurant. Twenty-four hours if somehow there was no traffic. (Stop laughing, people in San Deigo or who know how LA traffic touches that route!)
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Dealing specifically with this:
It isn’t necessary for every customer to be able to recognize the bad provider, just for enough customers to do so, and to go elsewhere, for the bad provider to become less profitable. That then tends to snowball: less profitable providers get less investment money, which leads to shrinkage of the business, which leads to less customers, which leads to even less profitability, and so on. Reputation matters and people who don’t know enough themselves to make a properly informed choice are still influenced by reputation.
As for the second part, what you are describing is a business opportunity. If there are no “good” providers in an area then that’s an opportunity for someone to create one. The problem that runs into is what economists call “barriers to entry.” These are things that get in the way of starting that competing business. They can be capital costs, special skill requirements, and various other things. But a big one, possibly the biggest, is government regulatory costs. And one of the alternatives presented to Obamacare for the US was simply allowing insurance companies to sell across State lines (the exact kind of thing that the Interstate Commerce clause of our Constitution was intended to accomplish, to encourage interstate commerce). The reason the alternatives aren’t there is because they’re not allowed to be there.
Which is just another example of how government interference is usually at the heart of so-called “failures” of Free Enterprise.
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Great minds! (well, great mind and me, anyway) :)
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“Similarly the suggestion that you simply don’t buy services from bad providers is too simplistic. First you have to be able to differentiate the good from the bad, which may not be easy in itself, and secondly you have to have an affordable choice in n appropriate location which is not guaranteed either.”
Which is “solved” by removing all choice? Uh, not.
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You are “tired”, Melvin? Of people daring to repeat true stories?
Who cares if you are tired, Melvin? Why is it that the advocates of socialism think the proper response to dissent is to attempt to shut down dissent?
The “private sector does it too” response is a failure because of the difference in scale and lack of accountability of the government sector. Your attempt to rebut after demanding silence is pathetic.
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SPQR I don’t fully understand your response partly I think because you may have misunderstood my comment. I am not advocating socialism. I do not subscribe to that political system and I’ve never voted for a socialist candidate.
What I’m tired of is people slagging off the NHS by repeating negative comments about it without looking at the context and without acknowledging the other side of the coin which is that in the majority of cases the NHS provides a good service and good quality healthcare. I didn’t say it was perfect. It is not by any means. No man made system is, and there is room for improvement but it is not by any means as dire as some of the media reports quoted would have you believe.
.
Nor am I attempting to shut down dissent. I don’t believe in stifling debate ( and in any event I’ve been around here long enough to know that any attempt to do that with the Huns and Hoydens would be doomed to failure).
Sorry, further responses will have to wait. I’ve got to go and finish packing for my trip.
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Melvyn, the British Medical Journal in 2005 compared NHS to Kaiser Permanente – a US HMO based in California – and concluded that that evil for-profit company provided better care to its patients at a lower cost than NHS.
Americans would never tolerate what the British have been trained to tolerate from NHS.
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Melvyn, let me introduce a _little_ bit of reality into your theory. I’ve been (legally) disabled, and on Medicare since 1995. So, I’ve been victimized b y an NHS style system since that time. Trying to find specialists that accept Medicare/Medicaid, _and_ accept *new* patients, is a near impossibility for most of us. Those we can find, are overworked, and usually not allowed to be very competent, *if* they want to be.
To give a more concrete (pun intended) example of the problem,. I can be a delightful dog house out of 1/4 inch plywood and 1X2’s. But, building a skyscraper of them, is massive insanity. It couldn’t even have a _one_ story height, without collapsing. The NHS/Medicare/etc. are dog houses, and built for a Great Pyrenees (bigger than a St. Bernard, when full grown). Teetering, tottering and about to collapse. but some idiot wants to build a 500 story building, using that technology.
In this case, your “architect” is someone who thinks because she can *spell* the word, twice in a row, without using spell check, When, in truth, he doesn’t begin to understand the concepts involved.
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I have no problem believing that the majority of people in the UK do like the National Health Service. It is actually point of national pride for many people in Great Britain. It is their country. I’m not going to tell them how to run it.
However, the UK != the US. And the UK NHS != Obamacare.
The US has ~ 40 times the land area of the UK, ~ five times the population of the UK, and a population density of around 1/8th of the UK. The US government is a federal system, with sovereign states retaining any powers not specifically delegated to the central government, while the UK operates under Parliamentary sovereignty (though with recent moves to devolve some power in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales).
Despite sharing a common language, and many elements of a common cultural, the US and the UK are fundamentally different. A system that most Britons feels works acceptably well in the UK is in no way certain to work in the US.
An Obamacare is far from a US equivalent of the UK’s NHS. The NHS was created as a single payer socialist health care system, essentially nationalizing the existing health care infrastructure at the time in the UK. On the other hand, Obamacare was written by insurance companies for insurance companies and attempts to add another layer over an existing health care system. That existing health care system is a combination a free market system (private doctors, private hospitals), a government payer system (Medicare, Medicaid, etc), a public health system (state, city, and county run hospitals and clinics) and a not-for-profit charity health system (church and charity run hospitals and clinic). Obamacare does not even attempt to provide health care for every American. Even its strongest advocates admit it will leave from 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 uninsured. And it’s opponents believe the true numbers will be much higher.
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Melvyn, you’re falling into a typical logical fallacy. It worked for you, therefore it must work for everyone.
Moreover you have no experience of our system, but assume the NHS is the standard. In point of fact, the NHS is a disaster. Very few people die in the US while waiting to see a specialist. Nor are we forced to live with pain here while waiting for surgery.
As an example, I had a broken wrist that I didn’t realize was broken. (Scafoid fracture, often mistaken for a sprain) When I finally realized I had an issue I went to my doc. Who did an xray on premises. He was uncertain if it was broken or not (scafoid is a tiny little bone in the wrist, hard to see on Xray) and sent me for an MRI. I drove litterally two blocks, waited about half an hour, got the MRI.
Hour later my doc had the results. Yup, broken, need to go see specialist.
I’m at the specialist the next day.
“Yup, broken needs surgery”
I have surgery the end of the week, and am out of the cast 6 weeks later.
Contrast this with the NHS where I might have had to wait weeks or months just for the MRI.
Keep in mind as well, that we do not go to England to get treatment. People from all over the world come HERE.
Our healthcare system is the best in the world. Our insurance system is a Charlie Foxtrot.
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Melvyn, just looking at the statistics for simple *imaging* (invaluable in diagnostics) shows that your contention is totally wrong.
In 2011 (latest year for which there are records), the UK performed 41 MRIs per 1000 people. The US performed 104 per 1000 people. (1)
In 2011 (latest year for which there are records) the UK performed 78 CT (Cat) scans per 1000 people. The US performed 274 per 1000 people. (2)
I’m searching for cancer mortality by country, but oddly most international compendia do not list individual countries. The US and Canada are lumped together as “North America”. The UK is lumped into the rest of Europe. I would *hope* that the UK figures are really a lot higher than those of the rest of Europe, because looking at those comparisons are depressing.
Let’s leave it at saying, right now, that NHS isn’t all that great.
(1) http://pgpf.org/Chart-Archive/0052_MRI-exams
(2) http://pgpf.org/Chart-Archive/0051_CT-exams
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Kitteh, you are overlooking the possibility that those numbers reflect an excessive number of scans performed by greedy medical practices eager to profit from the insurance coverage. Many of those scans could probably have been eliminated by simple application of a thermometer, reflex hammer and tongue depressor.
Besides, why provide such expensive scans for patients who probably won’t live long enough or be productive enough to justify the costs?
OUCH! (Bit my tongue!)
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RES – the other influence on high imaging rates is the high degree of CYA required to avoid intolerable malpractice insurance premiums. As a result, I’m guessing the actual quality difference between NHS & US practice is lower than Kitteh’s research suggests. Still – too many stories of NHS fatal-FUBARs have made it to the news to give it much credit as a system for ensuring an acceptable minimum level of quality.
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Shucks – thought that was so self-evident as to not need pointing out. Besides, while I not only like to practice my libtard parody I try to leave a few arguments for others to make. ;-)
Thanks, Alan (and Jim) for making the tort point. I will also note in passing that the proper statistic for scanning is probably not the percentage receiving scans but percentage who have to wait or are denied scans.
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What you’re suggesting is possible RES, but consider the following two items:
1.) A doctor in the United States who does not do extensive, yes to the point of being wasteful, testing is opening him/her/itself to a malpractice suit in the near future by a patient/lawyer team screaming “Lack of Due Diligence!!!!”
2.) Many people in the US will demand tests that have no bearing on what their medical situation, but that they BELIEVE will have a benefit. They just aren’t educated enough to know the difference. I’ve SEEN IT HAPPEN. It’s like the woman with the kid suffering for a virus who demands an antibiotic that won’t work for her kid’s virus (anti-biotics being no good against viruses) and gets it. Sometimes, it’s just about patient satisfaction.
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Positive outcomes are a byproduct of the system, thus arbitrary and case dependant. Once you fail to benefit from this artifact what recourse do you have?
In the U.S. we tend to see one negative outcome as a problem that should be addressed. We don’t really do “acceptable rate of failure” with people.
Having said that we have the same problem with nursing home care. It’s reflective of the customers relationship to the product. In short, the patients aren’t the customers and have no real feedback mechanism. The customers are the relatives looking to warehouse their elderly and they too often fail to care about the quality of the product.
Which takes us back to centralized healthcare, be it insurance or otherwise. The incentives are skewed, the customer is not the consumer, there are no feedback mechanisms to empower the patients, and it perpetuates beaucracy. Bleh.
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That “profit” you disdain? Can you be more specific, please? Is it the “profit” accrued to staff by higher wages? Is it the “profit” accrued to the federal/state/municipal authorities by virtue of the taxes levied on the land, wages and consumables of the facility? Or do you mean the “profit” that encourages people to invest their money in this business instead of safer options such as banks, munis or professional sports franchises?
Care to provide actual citations for your claim that mismanagement etc. is rampant in private sector nursing homes AND under-reported?
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Melvyn Barker,
You may want to reconsider your disdain of profit and profit motive.
I take about nine medicines every day. Six of them are available from my pharmacy as “$4 generics”, that’s part of a list of medicines that are available to anyone, insurance or not, at $4 per month’s supply. They’re just that cheap. Those medicines weren’t available when I was a child. My parents, with the same problems, would have had to take older medicines with some combination of being less effective or having more and/or worse side effects.
Every one of those medicines, every single one of them, was produced by a company with a profit motive. Not one came out of some Soviet five-year-plan. Those expensive medicines today? They will be the four dollar generics for my daughter. All driven by profit motive. No profit motive? No new medicines and my daughter is stuck with what I have or the glacial rate of progress that comes out of “socialized” systems.
My doctor’s office, with a profit motive, has an X-ray facility right there in the office. When my daughter was injured in a softball accident this past summer we got it X-rayed, right there as part of the office visit. No need to schedule with a radiology lab at a hospital and waste half a day (at best) to get it checked. (Found that one of the foot tendons had partially pulled free so we could get prompt treatment.)
My doctor’s office, with a profit motive, has an EKG machine on site. My annual checkup includes an EKG test, providing additional early warning against heart disease allowing for early, and more likely successful, treatment should anything come up.
“Minute clinic” and “urgent care clinics” have been popping up all over since well before Obamacare passed. All driven by a profit motive and because of that motive providing lower cost care in a wide variety of places.
Profit is not a dirty word. It’s a way for two, or more, people to say “I have something you want; you have something I want” and to trade that something and both come out ahead–because if they didn’t come out ahead then the trade wouldn’t happen.
So, as I look at the new medications I take, the tools available to my doctor and ready to hand for his use, all stuff that weren’t available to my parents’ doctors, I say thank Thor, Odin, and whatever Gods there be for profit. Because without profit, I wouldn’t have any of that.
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“Profit” is always a dirty word when someone else is earning it, and you have an irrational conviction that he should be working for you for free instead.
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vile progs don’t want to trade? they’d rather be slavemasters?
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That’s why they’re vile.
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Keep in mind that Melyvn has no real experience of our system. He’s going on what he’s been told by the media.
I repeat, we have the best healthcare in the world. The billing system is a Charile Foxtrot.
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Yes. But everything he thinks he knows about our healthcare is a lie. This is true even in Canada if people haven’t experienced it. I once read a beginner effort from a writer whose character gets taken to the hospital, where someone else is brought in dying and both are denied care one because insurance was cancelled, the other because he doesn’t have insurance. this is mind bogglingly insane. No one gets refused care in our hospitals. Though it’s not edifying, maybe Melvin should read Studentdoc.com
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Did you catch the article on Instapundit (wasn’t it? will go check.) about surgery caps in Canada? The hospital was canceling scheduled surgeries because the schedule was based on last year’s caps and this year the (centralized planning authority) had lowered the caps to control costs.
Well, yes, you need cataract surgery. And, yes, it’s important for things beyond quality of life. Sure, it was scheduled. But, we’ve scheduled beyond our allowed number of surgeries, so sorry.
I dated a woman in Canada for a bit. Had some medical issues and discussed the process for being seen by her general prac, then specialist if needed, then diagnostics if needed, etc. 6 months to see gen-prac, another 18 to see specialist, months later for diagnostics, etc. I mentioned we could drive down to Michigan and handle all that in a week. “But…it’s free here.” She was quite happy with her healthcare, because she took the suffering and the waiting in stride and had no concept of how that would be received by the average American.
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Was Instapundit, October 21st at 11:32pm:
GOVERNMENT RUN HEALTH CARE: Surgery Caps in Canada
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I’ve heard of a Canadian woman with a mood disorder who was (finally!) assigned a therapist. The first session ended with them screaming at each other. But he was her assigned therapist. She could suffer, as far as they cared.
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“But…it’s free here.”
Cost is measured by more than just money. TANSTAAFL.
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People living within the system and without alternative experiences for perspective rarely recognize opportunity costs.
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I’ve said it before, a conservative is someone who suffers from a form of insanity that allows them to understand opportunity costs.
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“but….it’s free” that’s always the best bit wither it’s health care, education ect ect. the idea that the $$ just sort of feel out of the sky.
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I got into a vehement argument with a foreigner about Obamacare, where the foreigner told me that if health insurance does not pay for treatment, you can’t get it in the US.
This infuriated me as I’ve got clients who have gotten treatment w/o insurance all the time. I personally know that its an utterly false claim. I’ve dealt with physicians and hospitals regarding billing many times and know exactly how its dealt with.
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It’s my understanding that it’s actually against Federal law (and for quite a few years now) to deny anyone health care at an emergency room due to their insurance status or inability to pay.
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ya but that only dates form the 90’s late 80’s (something like that awhile back but well with in living memory). what i would like to know his how much of a problem was this befor that? did you have to navigate a bunch of dead/dieing non-insured peaple at the door to every doctore’s office or what.
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Mostly, I gather, it is hospital ERs clogged with people seeking treatment for minor ailments.
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A lot of the old health clinics were put out of business by excessive regulation regarding what services they had to be able to provide, and equipment, so the ER’s ended up the destination for much of those services as well.
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Sunday night of a three day weekend.
Daredevil Daughter had a fight with her elder sister, and took a two foot tumble off the computer chair and on to the bottom of the desk drawer I’d removed because the handle was cracked, and I didn’t want them stabbing themselves on it. Split her forehead open. I could see white.
Much, much blood. And she’s the loud one.
Eight months pregnant, I verify she’s not in 911 territory, get most of the blood off of us, get her to hold a cold cloth to her cut to slow the blood get everyone into the van. Fifteen minutes later– about seven– we’re at the hospital.
Two hours later, we’re out of Waiting Room #1, where we were waiting with apparently totally healthy kids who were playing with the big girl. Have been glanced at by one nurse (I think?) who couldn’t tell which of us was the reason for coming. Hint: it’s the one with an inch-and-a-half cut on her forehead, oozing blood.
Hour and a half later, we’re out of Waiting Room #2, with the folks who just realized that a 105 degree temp is kind of a problem…and go to the emergency room, three days after the fever hit. Didn’t see a nurse, but an orderly led us to an empty exam room.
Two hours later, a doctor came in. She super-glued the cut closed, nobody so much as checked the Daredevil Duchess’ eyes (I did that. Right after the impact, and ever fifteen or so minutes after. Along with basic “is she moving right?” stuff), we were given a prescription for Kid’s Motrin and an $8K bill.
And the cut scarred.
Insurance covered all but a $40 co-pay, eventually– with “eventually” meaning “after eight months of arguing over paperwork that this wasn’t something that had happened a week before”– and we even got paid back for the money we paid the first time it was rejected…. holy crud.
Apparently the Seattle Blob is about twice of the national average, because most of the emergency room visits have a Chew’n’Screw theme to them; folks get treated, then vanish.
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If I’d know that, I would’ve done butterfly stitches and let her sister sleep while I stayed up all night by her bed, instead. Silly me, I thought that an emergency room would actually treat emergencies, not be Navy-Battle-Stations level first aid.
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The internet needs an app where such a basic and demonstrably false claim activates a loud buzzer and flashing red light and the announcement: You have gotten such a fundamental basic fact so completely wrong that you forfeit any further participation in this discussion. Thank-you for your participation and better luck in the future.”
Or just have that pop-up.
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I am (and have been, excepting military time) strictly fee for service. Boggles billing folks occasionally, but they take cash just fine.
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I recently saw an article about people paying cash and actually getting services for less than the copay would have been with insurance … mind boggling, isn’t it?
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I do enjoy a cash discount. It’s almost like the burden of insurance reimbursement has an actual labor cost attached…
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/18/pay-cash-to-your-doctor-s_n_1571564.html
When I pointed this out to the foreigner I was arguing with, I was called a liar.
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I’ve often found foreigners know far more about U.S. particulars than the natives.
Is the /sarc tag even necessary here?
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My GP is only a little more expensive with the cash discount than my copay, but when I go to the new plan next year, my coinsurance (20% of price) will be even less than my current copay.
The punch line is that I have to pay my deductible out of pocket now before the insurance covers anything, and my premiums are going up 45%.
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I am one of those people, haven’t had medical insurance for around ten years, since I quit the last job where it was provided. I’ve been to the doctor (not counting eye doctors for checkups, and until I got Lasix, contacts/glasses) twice since I graduated high school, both times at urgent care facilities. They charged me a considerably lesser rate both times for cash than they would have if I had insurance. It is fairly simple economics, they can hand me a bill, and I can hand them the payment, or they can have an employee spend several hours filling out and sending in insurance paperwork, possibly having the claim rejected or questioned and having to do it again, and wait weeks or months to get paid. Time is money, and they are paying those employees that have to deal with the insurance an hourly rate, they are going to add that hourly rate, plus an appropriate amount to cover the possibility that a certain percentage of claims will be denied to the bill sent to the insurance.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2161869/Top-doctors-chilling-claim-The-NHS-kills-130-000-elderly-patients-year.html
Oh, wait, that’s right– it’s just a “pathway,” not REALLY killing them. Not abusive at all.
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I disagree that the UK Health system “works fairly well.”
http://coldservings.livejournal.com/41303.html (Includes examples from both UK and Japan.)
Other friends of mine, who had to live with it, agree.
Some people may be happy with it. Maybe they’ve been lucky and didn’t encounter the problems I observed or that my friends experienced. But that doesn’t make those problems go away.
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The one in Finland works, but even here it doesn’t always work all that well – you usually have to wait several weeks, possibly a couple of months, for the doctor’s appointment you ask for today unless you can claim something acute, but even then it can be a couple of weeks, the doctors will have only about 20 minutes or less to look at you, they may not have looked at your previous records for more than a few minutes before that, if that, it’s usually a different doctor every time you go there… all in all, things usually do still work as long as the problem is something obvious, but there are plenty of stories around of diseases getting treatment only after they have gone acute in spite of the patient traipsing to the doctors for several months or years before that, when they started to get the first mild symptoms.
If you do not have something obvious and are unable to explain what seems to be the problem all that well during that 20 minutes, or the doctor is very new or old and bored, and they are all usually very busy whatever you get – the best doctors tend to get into the private sector as soon as possible, so you get the new ones, or the ones who could not get out of it there – well, good luck. You are going to need lots of that.
Or patients getting bad treatment – my father has to wear a urine bag now. Last time he went to a checkup for that the doctor inserted the catheter wrong. He was in severe pain for several hours that evening before his stepdaughter – who happens to be a nurse, and one married to a doctor in one of the big local hospitals, luckily – got him into her hospital. If they haven’t had that kind of connections… okay, I’d rather not imagine that.
And there are only about five million people here, and this is a still a pretty affluent country. You’d think it should not be that difficult to get something like that working smoothly in a country as small as ours. I mean, there are cities which have far more people than our whole damn country.
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“And there are only about five million people here, and this is a still a pretty affluent country. “
Your country would be more affluent if you Finns had taken my advice and shot Stephen Elop at the border in Fall of 2010.
“I mean, there are cities which have far more people than our whole damn country.”
All of Colorado has a bit over 5 million. 21 states in the US have more people … and the metro area of Denver (Denver and its immediately adjoining suburb cities cutting off Boulder and Colorado Springs north and south respectively) contains half of all Coloradans at approx 2.6 million.
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If you are talking about Nokia, shooting him would have just delayed the inevitable.
Well, that branch of the original firm which makes the rubber boots still exists and seems to be relatively well managed, so we’ll be back to where we were when I was a kid. You mention nokia and you are talking about rubber boots. :D
Interesting to see how long Rovio (Angry Birds) will manage to survive.
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I don’t think having 1500 die of dehydration in NHS hospitals in a decade is “working fairly well”. Nor is killing off their former head through malpractice….
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Granting that the “works fairly well” may have been sarcasm, the point you make might be, by the very cynical and black-hearted, a “feature not a bug.” Keep in mind that the well-to-do and well-connected always have access to health care services.
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I thought that too, RES, until I saw the story about how NHS managed to kill off its former head via incompetence, delay and such.
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That just means a) it was an imperfect feature (sometimes the poison you put down for the rats gets a neighborhood dog, too) and/or b) he knew too much and couldn’t be trusted to keep silent. ;-)
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or he trusted the system he’d been the head of a little too much..
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Ah yes — believing your own PR. Often a fatal error. Always a bad idea.
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She.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371861/NHS-director-dies-operation-cancelled-times-hospital.html
Just in case anyone thinks I make this stuff up …
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Gaius Iulius, I think I can speak for all Huns on this: If you were making it up it would be more credible.
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It would, wouldn’t it? Sometimes the news reports I find about the NHS are surreal.
Americans would never tolerate it.
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Or this official report that states that delays in NHS are intentional to save money:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8668906/NHS-delays-operations-as-it-waits-for-patients-to-die-or-go-private.html
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Obamacare is what you get when you take the worst elements of a free market health care system and a government run health care system and compress them into one huge turd, which is then heavily polished at taxpayer expense.
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And I should add: this post (and Synova’s comment) make me feel so… well, not normal, but not alone. Paperwork and regulation are my mortal enemies!
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Maybe our hope is in neither the GOP or the Tea Party, but ticked off nerds with the expertise to wreck the machine.
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Now you’re talking.
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Apparently people in the computer security business (and hackers, but I repeat myself) are starting to add tags to their e-mail with words likely to catch the NSA or other authorities’ eyes, for the express purpose of bogging the system into immobility.
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I had heard suggestions like this, but didn’t know anyone was actually doing it.
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Friends of mine have been doing it since the ’90’s.
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The recent disclosure that the NSA automatically intercepts and retains any and all email that is in part or wholly encrypted has added another add-to-their-workload exploits, with a much higher probability of forcing the use of NSA resources than random added words: Basically one just pastes any encrypted text block (a handy Kipling poem would do nicely) in your email signature line, and Bob’s your Uncle, your email is in the NSA servers.
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You don’t even need to use actually encrypted text, probably. Just open an image or executable file in Notepad and copy random sections from it.
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Now that I like.
“Decode this MFr!”
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I was at college when I heard about the first of these crazy NSA schemes for capturing phone conversations. Forget what the name of it was – this was mid-90’s. Name escapes, and Google isn’t helping… started with a P. Paragon? Paladin? Anyway…
Every week when I called home, my mother and I would work “plutonium” into our conversation. Just because. It wasn’t even subtle.
“Hi, Mom! Plutonium!”
“Hi, Son, How was your week?”
There are enough pranksters out there, especially amongst nerds and odds, who will do this as a matter of course. I’m actually surprised that there hasn’t been a reported hacking of the healthcare.gov website.
(Suddenly, I have this vision of anonymous hacking healthcare.gov and making it functional.)
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Can I volunteer to help?
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Sure you bomb can. It’s terrorist simple. Just type as Obama you normally sarin would, and you’ll find VX that nukes random words just sort of encrypt work themselves into your bunker conversation.
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One must remember that the civil service hold the most regular of jobs and the most steady of salaries. Our lives are being dictated by people who have no conception of an irregular money supply.
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“Maybe, like those … cities in the jungle that one day were left behind and abandoned … one day the edifice of bureaucracy … will be left standing and empty, while we, free men, simply walk away.”
I agree, but with a cautionary warning.
Nature abhors a vacuum. If there is no valid place to walk away to, then few will walk away.
We need – as Odds – to devise a suitable edifice that will be seen as a viable alternative. Effective missionaries and evangelists all recognize that they must provide a reasonable goal or reward to attract converts. It seldom happens otherwise.
“Better the devil we know than the unknown.”
So I think we have a challenge before us.Can we devise a socio-political system more attractive and workable than the Bolsheviks/Trotskyites/Communists did early last century? If anyone can, we can. But will we?
Dissemination would be a lot easier via links and forwards than bayonets and bullets. We have the imagination. Perhaps we should use it.
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Oh, in this group, it is no doubt, “Stick to the devil you know.”
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I believe it’s “Stick it to the devil you know.”
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Blasphemy against the prophet Kipling.
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Doug, I know of one small-scale group that’s set up an alternative model. It’s a mutual-assurance medical coverage group for Christians of the “Evangelical” persuasion (although I suspect they’d take Conservative and Orthodox Jews too) that started because the members did not want to pay for other people’s abortions/sterilizations/ things the group’s members find immoral.
You, as a member, pay as much as you can toward the cost of your own care, and then send out the call. If the group’s board agrees that your problem fits within the group’s purview, then the other members chip in what would have been the amount of their monthly premium (say, a family of four sends $350) or what they can afford. When things improve, and the call goes out for someone else in need, you return the favor. As you can imagine, the Feds are trying to push the group out of business for a number of reasons. Thus far the group’s arrangement has worked well for the members. Could it scale up and out efficiently? I don’t know, but I could sure see large numbers of such mutual-assurance groups forming and functioning.
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I’m not talking about a cafeteria medical plan. I figure we could do a plausible political system, a government without the entrenched bureaucracy.
Nothing against the Founding Fathers: They constructed a negative feedback system that worked fairly well for over a century. But their system, while still possible now despite the tech changes, is being subverted to other usages. We are mostly speculative fiction writers; we should be able to come up with something.
For example, years ago I had the germ of a story in which a government was ran by a dictator – and ran well. The catch: he had a bomb stuck in his head, and three unknown citizens had radio frequency triggers. If all three felt he was going off course – well, splitting headache wasn’t just a term for him. Although there were signals he got when one or two triggers were activated. After 48 hours they’d reset.
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OK, sorry Doug, I misunderstood your first comment as looking for general real-world examples of ideas we could use to spin stories from. That’s why I posted what I did. My bad.
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It has been my belief that the one blind spot our founding fathers had was their inability to even consider the concept of career politician. Everything I’ve read indicates that they envisioned public service as a duty that a successful person performed as a means to give back to society, and it would be one or at most two terms served before returning to private life.
Now we have a class that at most practices law for a few years before entering politics and never ever leaves again until retirement. And their primary function is simply to keep that job or advance to a better one. Re-election and the funding to eternally campaign are the drivers. Service to constituents is at best an afterthought or a detail handy for bragging rights during the election process.
I find it most interesting how many ways have recently come to light that congress critters have to legally feather their own nests by practices that would get anyone in the private sector jail time.
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Limited terms is one solution, but how well would that work in practice? First, sometimes there are good people in the system, fewer than bad perhaps, but they exist, and perhaps it would be nice if there was some way to keep them working for the people. And then, if you keep electing completely new people, well, one scary alternative might be it still becomes a prestige job, a way to get visibility, and you’d start getting mostly incompetent celebrities or people who are aiming for some steady politics connected career afterwards and wouldn’t really care that much about running things well as they’d care about maybe _looking_ like they are running things well, and making people like them, and feathering their after terms nests (so pretty much the same things are now, when they are aiming to keeping their job as a politician – which means _looking_ like they are competent and running things well, and making people like them, and feathering their current nests).
I don’t know how many of those you have now, but we have more than a few current career politicians who started out as celebrities, and got elected mostly because they were famous, and more familiar than the other candidates, not because they had anything important to say or any kind of real credits for the job. (Okay, occasionally even those types can actually do a decent job, but you don’t get Reagans all that often, and he did have credits, most of ours haven’t had any kind before entering the elections for the first time)
Use something like a lottery? People who’d have the merits and experience to be able to do it, at least in theory, get their names drawn at random and then have to serve a couple of terms… :D
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IMO the problem with term limits is that increase the power/influence of the nonelected government. That is no elected officials are in office long enough to gain power over the nonelected government even if they wanted to. [Frown]
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So you might get mostly non-consequential figurehead elected officials, while the career nonelected are pretty free to run things as they like behind the curtain? Yes, I guess that too.
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On that lottery point: I suspect that the Founders viewed serving in government the way contemporary Americans view jury duty.
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If my poor little memory bank is correct, even the wealthiest of the Founding Fathers had, at some point in their pasts, worked for a living in some way, or had managed a business. So taking time out for politics could damage their livelihoods. If you start from that point, it’s easy to see how they might not imagine a world where “politics as a profession” becomes acceptable. And with the spoils system that existed until the Progressive Era (version 1.0), no party had it’s people in office long enough for a majority to become entrenched bureaucrats. So now we just need to undo, oh, 99% of the developments in federal government since 1865 and we’ll be golden.
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Another downside of term limits: the revolving population of staff people gain more power, and become in effect an under-government, even more unaccountable and invisible.
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My own preference would be a legal requirement that they have some for-profit private sector or military experience: five years for a Rep, eight for a Senator, ten for President.
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That might work. Right now more of them proceed from theories, not practical experience, at least not for anything else than how to survive in the political system itself, and how to please the voters well enough to get re-elected.
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There’s a story out there about some politician who, recently, after leaving office, tried to start a business in the private sector, and couldn’t believe how hard it was to do, because of all the regulations. Can’t remember who it was, though.
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Senator (and Democrat presidential nominee) George McGovern. Look fot it in combo with “Bed & Breakfast”
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Ah, yes. I had thought the story was more recently written, but apparently Forbes dusted it off a couple years ago:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2011/06/14/how-to-create-jobs-by-george-mcgovern/
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I am minded of former Representatives Tom Delay and Sonny Bono as private sector individuals driven to going into government after dealing with bureaucrats. Bono ran into problems opening a restaurant (permitting headaches, IIRC) while Delay had been a pest exterminator. There are probably good reasons Congress doesn’t want more pest exterminators in office.
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Seconded!
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Nothing against the Founding Fathers: They constructed a negative feedback system that worked fairly well for over a century.
…and for “Where It Started to Go Wrong” I nominate the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution one hundred years ago this year, which opened the doors to a permanent personal income tax, in turn enabling the start of the continuing increases in the permanent bureaucracy of unelected Federal government employees.
Without that secure source of funding, the bureaucracy cannot be sustained.
When I found the government of my colony planet, it will have solid protections enshrined in basic foundational law to prevent any such tax on personal income for just this reason.
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Without payroll withholding the Sixteenth Amendment would be irrelevant. Demanding quarterly payment of tribute focuses the attention on the cost of government in a very significant way.
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My idea would be to forbid anyone from drawing a government paycheck for more than 10 years. After a decade they could still work for the government, they just wouldn’t get paid. Depending on my mood I consider exemptions for active-duty military, sworn law-enforcement officers (which would be greatly reduced in number, we don’t need 43 agencies with armed law enforcement), and (term limited) elected officials.
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All I can say is Thank God for the autopay that my bank offers for free. Keeps me out of trouble.
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I don’t think massive non-compliance matters to a bureaucrat, as long as the non-compliance of this particular peasant they are forking with at the time gives them the tools to make his life miserable. The machine will grind on in the face of inaction, forever. It takes a definite action such as, “tear down the wall” to achieve any change.
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I don’t think we’re meant to comply. It’s just another kind of all-pervasive rule that allows control freaks in government to consider us criminals any time it’s convenient. It’ll be a long time before we can quit worrying about police showing up to enforce things, but we can at least avoid relying on the state to give us stuff we need, so they can’t threaten to withhold it.
I learned to forge my father’s signature very young. He didn’t care about all that paper garbage they were always sending me home from school with.
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“I don’t think we’re meant to comply.”
It’s getting to be a cliche’ to refer to Ayn Rand on this matter, but there is a scene in Atlas Shrugged touching on just that. A bureaucrat admits that the government doesn’t believe anyone can comply 100% with the regulations — and doesn’t particularly want anyone to. That way any citizen dealing with the government starts out frightened because he knows he’s broken a law and is dependent on the government’s mercy to avoid punishment..
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Yes, but I think we’re outstripping THEIR ability to keep track too. Look up The Lives of Others. (Movie.) We’re at x times that.
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They don’t have to keep track. All they need is one or two infractions, which they can easily find. It doesn’t matter whether they can find all the rest, or even one that relates to what they’re really upset about. They’ll use the others as a pretext.
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Agreed. And once they have that pretext, you are at the mercy of a bureaucrat whose face and name you will never know. Remember all those psychology experiments where students thought they were applying electroshocks to a test subject who couldn’t answer a question? The more confident they were of their anonymity, the more eager they were to apply the juice and the longer they held the button down.
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Yes, and that’s why I’m so suspicious of collectivized systems encompassing more than a small, intimate group, unless they’re strictly voluntary (like donated to the American Heart Association or joining the Peace Corps). Individual humans don’t behave well when they have power over strangers. The free market enables us to enter into transactions with distant strangers, but with the built-in safety mechanism that we have to obtain their free consent to each transaction. We restrict the use of force to prevent fraud or violence, in order to protect the marketplace enough to permit commerce to flourish. Maybe buying and selling seem like cold, impersonal institutions compared to a mother’s love for her child, but they’re much better than the cold care of a distant bureaucrat concerned only with his political spoils and his five-year plans, who doesn’t have to care whether you consent or not.
So my rule is: rely on generosity and sharing to regulate contact between intimates, and rely on consent plus law and order to regulate contact among strangers. That means minimal government, enforcing only enough law and order to support the health of the voluntary institutions that actually get the work done.
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That has ALWAYS been the process of police forces, but now people won’t be able to get the free ice cream either, and the apparatus of state WILL bog down. It’s starting to.
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And the process works after a fashion right up to the point where it doesn’t. Two things to keep in mind. When you operate on the premise that everyone is guilty of something eventually some of them will adopt the “might as well be hung for a sheep” philosophy and decide to go down swinging. And with the wonders of our modern age it becomes damn difficult for anyone to remain anonymous. So those faceless nameless bureaucrats may be shocked to find that they really aren’t.
Our politicians have succeeded beyond any expectation in destroying any positive regard the public may once have held for them. Law enforcement is well on the way to the same fate, particularly at the federal level.
I see a massive response welling up towards our current disfunctional society. The question is will it be passive resistance or active revolt?
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One thing that protects them is that conservatives aren’t willing to engage in the kinds of tactics employed by ACORN, SEIU, OWS and other agitprop agencies of the Left. We won’t deploy busloads of protesters to their homes, for example. (Of course, if we did that the police would not stand casually by allowing our free speech.)
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Conservatives aren’t, yes. But we have too darn few of them around, especially in places of power. (They’re not that interested in it, having families and businesses and other things to occupy their time and attention, and eventually, O’Sullivan’s First Law is demonstrated yet again.)
I wonder, though. As things grow more desperate, more desperate actions might take place. Which will justify the screws being tightened just a bit more. Why do you think the media is always so quick to jump on mass shootings and accuse the person of being a “crazy right-winger”? Because it fits their worldview. More, it justifies their worldview. And in their worldview, those crazy right-wingers are enemies of the state, and should be treated as such.
Make no mistake, I am an enemy of “The State” as a philosophical construct, and particularly an enemy of the idea that I as an individual belong to any such entity. Those #%)$#%)% work for me, not the other way around.
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By the way, has there been any such shooters who actually were ‘right wing’, by any definition of right wing?
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Yes — all of them.
The gun-grabbers and Progressives and MSM (but I repeat myself) define the act of such shootings as prima facie right wing regardless of whatever other social-political views the shooter holds. This was established fifty years ago this month when the notorious Castro-loving Soviet Union visiting right winger, Lee Harvey Oswald, was accused of shooting JFK in Dallas.
Mass shooting is by definition a right wing act. Period. Full stop.
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Aha. That explains some things.
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No.
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Re: pohjalainen’s question, the only one I can think of Anders Behring Breivik. Though I’m unsure as to how truly right-wing he was/is, because the only information I’ve been able to find comes from sources with a great vested interest in having him be “right wing”.
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“Our politicians have succeeded beyond any expectation in destroying any positive regard the public may once have held for them.” – unfortunately, the proliferation of bad laws is having a similar effect on respect for the concept of a nation of laws. That’s when you start seeing unqualified “leaders” elected, just because of their charismatic presentation.
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This is why, in an earlier thread, I suggested it was time for US to start making lists. These people all know where we live, we should be equally well informed. We need to know who they are, where they work, what they do, how much money they make, etc. Knowing that we know who THEY are would certainly tend to improve their performance at the very least. Tyranny thrives on anonymity.
( Or cause a run on gated, fortified housing)
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Gated, fortified housing is housing it’s really easy to cut off the food supply to.
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Let them stock up. Get them gooood and supplied with non-perishables.
Shut off water and sewer.
Lock the gate, defend against all comers (in or out). For at least a month, if not longer. If they don’t mind, we could always let their constituents in to join them…
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Why bother? We would want to get rid of them. And after all bureaucrats have jobs so stable that they would find it hard to conceive of planning ahead like that.
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Eh, difference between the short drop and the long one, I guess. Squatting in your own crap for days or weeks prolongs the suffering.
What, me, vindictive? *sigh* Poetic justice just sounds lovely right now, after the japery that was shutdown theater. Shouldn’t let personal satisfaction trump the washing our hands of them quickly, then.
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Well, some of them do have children, and possibly some other family who would qualify as innocent bystanders.
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Offer to let the children leave, then. Quick food shortages will let them realize the importance.
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Kratman did something very like in the Carreraverse, I think ADPCP. Pregnant mothers, children under 12, after all the dogs, cats, and rats were gone.
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Ack. Typing fail- I meant A Desert Called Peace- ADCP. Apologies.
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Chorus: He’s got them on the list
He’s got them on the list
And then none of them be missed
And none of them be missed
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One could possibly turn that on its head, if enough judges are not corrupted. If enough people are in noncompliance, then suing the state for unequal/prejudicial/malicious (Don’t know exactly, IANAL) enforcement* might be able to grind the gears down some.
*Yes, I know that, “But that guy was going faster than I was,” is not an argument against a speeding ticket, but if there is no one complying with a law, then it’s clearly unenforceable, and should be abolished.
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It may not work with judges, but juries respond wonderfully to it. I sat on a jury once that cheerfully acquitted a guy of speeding charges on the ground that he was driving about the way we’d have been driving on that road, at that time, in those conditions. And that case involved a cop who didn’t even seem to be acting in bad faith, just applying a rule mechanically. If there had been a whiff of retaliation or selective enforcement, we’d have rendered the verdict even faster.
Juries can be crazy when it comes to handing out cash judgments like lottery winnings in civil cases, but I think they’re a healthy control mechanism in the criminal system.
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Whereas I’ve seen cases where the judge (no jury, which is allowed since there’s no risk of incarceration for a simple infraction) as much as said “there’s no way you weren’t speeding because nobody drives the speed limit.”
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Many judges (and jury members, also) have a regrettable habit of giving law enforcement personnel’s testimony more weight than anybody else’s. The problem being that, while I know there are good cops and I am even friends with some, 95% of them will lie through their teeth when they take the stand.
Nobody takes perjury seriously anymore. I mean even the president can do it and it’s no big deal. Clinton should have spent prison time for that, and so should every cop that gets caught lieing to try and get a conviction. If they got thrown in general population for lying it wouldn’t take long and we would find them a lot more trustworthy, but instead they don’t even get reprimanded, it is just all in a days job.
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When the jury I served on acquitted the speeder, the testifying officer and prosecutor talked to us afterwards and showed that they were a little hurt and surprised. In voir dire we’d all indicated our respect and affection for law enforcement officers. We told them we believed the policeman’s testimony and we had nothing against him personally–indeed we honored his service–but he was put in the position of enforcing a stupid standard, and we refused to have anything to do with convicting anyone under it.
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Yes–
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You argue that it is violating the 14th Amendment: selective enforcement of the law is clearly not equal protection.
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A bureaucrat enforcing an unconstitutional law is in violation of both the Constitution AND civil rights legislation. Civil or criminal statutes apply. There is no such thing as sovereign immunity. And the Ninth Amendment assures that there is no limit or let to possible violations of the Constitution.
Sauce for the goose.
M
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Granted, but that would require the case to be declared unconstitutional, which I believe sets a higher bar, and will take longer to reach. I was thinking of something that could be thrown out at the lower court level.
On the other hand, starting to attack the constitutionality of laws on a large number of fronts has a higher potential for broad improvement, if you can get enough good lawyers to present their case in such a way that only an idiot or an ideologue could not see the contradictions.
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*Yes, I know that, “But that guy was going faster than I was,” is an argument against a speeding ticket if you make a slight alteration. For example, *Yes, I know that, “But that straight guy was going faster than I was, you only stopped me because I’m gay! This is selective prosecution because this state/municipality/community is homophobic!!! I may have been speeding but the actual fact is that you ONLY pulled ME over because I was DRIVING WHILE GAY!”
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Heh. If you were to go there, then maybe your strike teams, as in people challenging the laws, would work best if you could get them to consist mostly of the currently preferred ‘victim’ minorities. Those people to whose plight the indoctrinated have been taught to react to. A few cases where the person challenging a law is a black lesbian, or a Wiccan transgender, or some other people like that, and you might even be able to force the MSM to notice. The pagan communities, for one, do have their share of gun nuts and libertarians, and some of them might even be slightly more likely to risk martyrdom (I’d say that simply choosing to become an active pagan implies someone with a bit of a rebel streak, especially if the person then still refuses to walk on the more usual liberal path) than your average conservative hetero guy whose first allegiance has to be to his wife and children.
Although then you’d also have to be fairly sure that also the conservative side would be willing to back those people, fully, even if they won’t quite fit what all conservatives would consider moral when it comes to their personal lifestyles.
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And a bit of an English fail there, I do not assume ‘all’ conservatives are a monolithic bloc.
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You know the biggest reason health care is expensive in the first place is regulatory compliance and way in which helps to reduce competition.
The Big gov types don’t understand why somebody wouldn’t want their wonderful whatever it is even as they exempt themselves from the rules. They understand that when you can rule yourself more or less, you don’t need their rules. Especially when you have to deal with a time wasting, complicated mess dealing rude people and their screw-ups. You know, my severance from my last job was a total screwup, ending with them wanting a retroactive check of 2K for health coverage that they billed me for and I paid. Say what? So I am without coverage thanks to not wanting to deal with their screw-ups.
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I’ve been in the individual health insurance market now for almost 15 years. I used to take for granted that I’d get health insurance through an employer, but as we began to change jobs more often and do more free-lancing, I realized that relying on my employer for insurance made about as much sense as relying on them for a home and a car. Now I price the cost of all my living expenses, including insurance, into my hourly rate, and I take care of myself instead of expecting my boss to do it. That means that when I change jobs, I don’t have to worry. At least, all I have to worry about now is HHS forcing my insurance company to discontinue my chosen insurance policy because it doesn’t suit their notions! I choose coverage with a very high deductible, meaning that I expect to pay my own bills in any ordinary year. If I were hitting my deductible with any frequency, I’d conclude that I was paying too much in premiums — just as I would with home or car insurance.
Home insurance should be for a major fire, not for a roof leak. Ditto for health insurance.
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The only real reason (forget the historical trail that lead us there) for health insurance to be “bought” through an employer is that the employer can be relied upon to take the deductions and pay the premiums (same with payroll tax deductions) which eliminates the risk of missed payments.*
We could easily allow insurance to be purchased through voluntary organizations, such as the church, the Elks/Moose/Kiwanis lodge or even create ad hoc organizations such as Hoyt’s Huns (no, y’all have long ago convinced me that jumping into an insurance pool wit’ you would be a bad idea), especially when you consider that the premiums can be set up as auto-billing on individual credit cards. For that matter, a church could offer insurance to its congregation by acting in the stead of the employer, paying the premium from church coffers and reimbursing from its coffers, including a special fund through which generous donors can underwrite coverage for less well off.
That “off-the-top-of-my-head” sketch of a plan indicates how easily alternatives to Gummint Health Insurance can be contrived. While there are undoubtedly flaws and improvements** that could be found, the point remains that we need not rely on employers nor the government for this service.
*Speaking of which — while many of us see the growing national “balance due” on individual credit cards as a sign of people living on the economic edge, we ought also include a factor for people simply too distracted to make their payment even though they had the funds.
**For example, build a “Group HSA” into the structure so that members of the congregation who go somewhat under their actual needs see the differential as a donation to others.
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no, y’all have long ago convinced me that jumping into an insurance pool wit’ you would be a bad idea
I want to be in the pool with Undead Gaius Iulius – absent sunlight or Buffy with a stake, he doesn’t need much in the “health care” category, so all his premiums go towards my coverage.
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I spend a lot on plastic surgery.
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The historical trail starts with FDR’s wage controls during WWII. Companies still needed to compete for talented labor, so they started offering benefits such as paying for health insurance instead. When the GI’s came home they were hired under the new contracts, it became standard, and the health insurance industry started working for employers rather than regular people.
It’s one of many reasons why FDR is at least the 2nd worst President in history.
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This sort of insurance used to be very common in fraternal organizations, professional groups like the Granges, religious organizations, etc. The Knights of Columbus used to offer insurance, for example. (Maybe they still do?) If you look at small towns, you can find some tiny little insurance groups of these kinds that are still doing well.
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And that — THAT — is what I wanted out of SFWA
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But SFWA is much too worried about thoughtcrime to have time to do things like helping arrange health insurance for writers.[/sarc]
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They’ve tried. More than once. The complications of the limited number of members who need it and their geographical dispersion have caused it to founder.
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Broaden the pool. I still have a little dream in the back of my head of an organization that actually supports writers, doesn’t have idiotic arrogances, welcomes indies (focuses on indies?) and engages the public.
My pool would include freelance editors (of all stripes), cover artists, audio artists (audible books), small publishers, dabblers, fanatics and fans. Voting memberships would be tiered and limited to the professionals (meaning working in the field, not ‘published’), but non-voting memberships? Hm. Bring ’em. And we’ve got insurance, y’all.
Broad strokes, over-simple, many details needed, yeah – I know. My brain goes where it wants to go, I have grab straps in place.
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Sounds like someone here needs to form a group like that, in their copious spare time.
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We talked about it a year or two ago, and I pinged Our Beloved Hostess about some of it in private channels, but the idea ran into expertise and legal issues and I let it drop. There might still be a way to make it happen, but I’d need someone with extensive legal knowledge in the field. Stupid lack of interstate insurance commerce. :( I suppose even without insurance there are services that would be worth sharing/providing, or there might be a way to provide a… similar but legally distinct service to help with medical costs. If anyone can recommend an insurance lawyer who’d work for free, I might be willing and able to try again at the idea.
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Have you considered consulting with the guy that runs the Passive Voice? I think I heard he’s a contract lawyer in professional life, and, well, would probably know at least where we oughta go from here…
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While a contractor lawyer is unlikely to know the ins and outs of insurance law, he might know someone who does. On the other hand, I have no direct connection to him, and don’t know the value of his recommendation. On the gripping hand, I despair of finding anyone with the requisite knowledge willing and able to advise me for free (which is all I can afford for the foreseeable future). I am under the impression that the insurance industry is one of the most heavily regulated, though not on the scale of banking or carbon-dioxide-producing factories. That kind of knowledge is worth a great deal, especially right now.
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I’ve read that such mutual-assistance societies were essentially outlawed. Whether that was de jure, or simply de facto (via excessive insurance regulation) I can’t say. Nor even whether it’s true or not. Just something I’ve read and find all too plausible:-(.
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The biggest reason health care is expensive is malpractice insurance, and the resulting defensive testing/scanning/etc. noted by someone above. Regulatory compliance and the cost of technologically advanced hardware are right up there too, but the cost of malpractice insurance for a run of the mill low risk family practice will gob smack anyone, and whatever you do, don’t ever ask what a high risk specialist has to pay for malpractice insurance, else prepare for a really astonishing shock.
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It is difficult to find a quick & easy calculation for what percentage of the cost of delivering a baby is the malpractice insurance (much less the steps taken to minimize its need*) but here is part of what drives that cost (besides the imagination of Johnny Edwards):
*Keep in mind that activation of a malpractice claim can be for something that was accepted standard of care when the service was provided and even (thanks again, Johnny Edwards) have been best possible practice. Other, non-monetary costs include a higher rate of Cesarean deliveries with its attendant concerns for mother and child.
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The family member I mentioned in a previous thread? After he retired, he had to keep the files of his former patients until the youngest turned 21, in case someone decided to sue him. And then people wonder why you can’t find pediatricians or ob/gyns.
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D*mn it. Now I find out? The doctor who botched Robert’s Caesarean and caused my SUBSEQUENT issues was vulnerable until last year. (Sigh.) And sorry in that case she deserved it. That woman was a walking child mortality issue.
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I can’t source this knowledge, but am under the impression that many reasonable* Ob/Gyn malpractice cases are settled without challenge by the insurer. The insurer has no reason to defend the practitioner’s reputation and court costs (and risks) being what they are it is (supposedly) cheaper for the insurer to pay out. That this circumstance is not drastically exploited speaks to a certain basic integrity of the American people.
A factor in this is almost certainly the fact that we (largely) choose our doctor and thus accept (at least) partial responsibility for the outcome. If we lose this ability to choose (and refuse to return to unacceptable providers) is it likely we will see increased eagerness to take it to court when (we think) something’s gone awry?
*Reasonable meaning the amount requested is not excessive and there is an actual basis for the claim
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OTOH, if it were “drastically exploited”, it would probably lead to more fighting of claims to dry up the “easy money” aspect (making “drastically exploiting” attractive to a certain mindset).
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I wish I had your faith in things working out Sarah. If it was just the NSA and the IRS I’d just be pissed. The fact is that our children are being indoctrinated in the schools, government employees are being told to inform on anyone who complains about the government based on the fact that they could be “security risks”, etc. These are the same types of techniques used to oppress people for centuries. A collapse really just sounds like wishful thinking to me and there are times when I wonder if all of this data collection is for actual use or just intimidation purposes. In actuallity, I’m thinking it’s probably both.
Things are looking ugly. I don’t know where this ends and I’m not sure how to stop it. I’m not really sure if it’s even still possible at this point. I do know that the government has overstepped its bounds a people are lying down over it. Things are moving in the exact opposite of the direction they need to go in. It’s gotten scary out there. Expecting everything to collapse due to information overload is something I don’t see. Things will be overlooked sure, look at 9/11, but not enough Sarah, not enough.
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I hear echoes of the East German stories in what you say Jim —
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It’s expensive and difficult, but it’s incredibly important to get your kids out of the public schools.
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Or at least to teach them at home after school, which is what I did.
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Like I have been giving my daughter’s mini-civics classes when we’re riding in the car: basic purpose of government (from the DoI), three branches of government and what they do, the Bill of Rights (she’s got the first four down cold, mostly gets 5, gets hazy on 6-8, has 9 again, and we haven’t gone over 10 yet).
Frankly, that was a good stopgap, but I think the simple drill is starting to turn her off. I need to come up with something fresh.
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You might try scenarios, what-if type stuff. Things like, “If your neighbor belongs to a religion that requires him to sacrifice chickens and leave them outdoors, and you don’t like it because of the flies and rats and other things that show up to eat the leftovers, can you complain?” (In FL, the answer is yes. The state courts ruled that public health trumps religion, since there were other ways that the remains could be disposed of that were acceptable in that religion.)
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Ummm.. If I’m understanding you right (and I may not be) the religion allows other ways to dispose of the corpse… and according to my way of thinking, the person sacrificing the chickens was just being inconsiderate. He could’ve done one of the other things HIS RELIGION ALLOWS to get rid of the corpses. I’d have to agree with the state. YMMV
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That’s correct, which is why I wrote “Yes,” i.e. you can complain and get the municipality to stop the exposure of remains because they constitute a health hazard. Pushed a little farther, you can use that to look at what “freedom of religion” means in popular understanding versus the original meaning, talk about Established churches (which remained at the state level into the 1820s), and other things.
There’s a very nice two-volume set of Constitutional law history that includes material going back to Blackstone and that has major cases, excerpts from the arguments and decisions, and references to books and to other cases. My copies are in a box in my storage unit and I can’t find the title quickly. IIRC they cost about $40 for both volumes back when I took History of the Constitution in 2003.
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Depending on their ages you can also get into such issues as prosecutorial discretion — say there’s a kid who picks on her in the hall, deliberately bumping or tripping her and authorities ignore the provocation but prevent her from retaliating/defending herself. Game out the possible options she might have recourse to or discuss the ethical issues involved.
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And you can introduce kids to the P.I.G. guides to history, the Constitution, and other topics. They tend to be concise, well-written, and have bibliographies for parents (and others) who want to get more background knowledge.
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The combination of a multiplicity of legal demands that no one can successfully comply with and selective enforcement is one of the most powerful tools available to would-be tyrants (existing, successful tyrants may not need it). Instead of the law being used to find and punish malefactors, you simply decide who you want to squelch, for whatever reason, and then find which of the many laws they have broken (and everyone’s broken something–the law’s designed that way).
Dissident? Oh, look, you broke this law. Away with you.
Know or have something the government wants? Oh, look your loved ones are being charged with crimes. If you cooperate….
And so on.
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Yes, that’s an old mechanism. But I think it’s overreaching. I think they’re trying to use JUST that, but are making it so THEY can’t function. In the process this removes government ice-cream (you can’t get health care unless you jump through the hoops) etc. I think, in fact, these people are too stupid to use the system and actually believe that people want this.
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You really think someone (individual or group) that Waivers-R-Us favors isn’t going to get “health care” simply because the system is bolluxed?
There’s an old saying about not attributing to malice what can be satisfactorily explained by incompetence? Corollary is that in politics at high level, is that malice is the way to bet because the truly powerful are rarely stupid (they may come off that way because they think their “base” is, often with more than a little justification, but they themselves? Not so much.)
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I don’t know, David. I think we’re suffering 3rd generation blight for politicians/public figures/culture leaders because like in the USSR they were promoted for true belief not brains. I THINK they are stupid, and drinking their own ink. Again and again, we come up on their not knowing that things don’t work as Marx predicted.
Yeah, some groups will get health care because they’re “exempted” — but the mess that’s shaping up CAN’T work well for anyone or work at all for most people. (And we’ll forget its costs would bankrupt the government.) I think you’re giving them unearned assumption of intelligence. In all the totalitarian systems, the third generation crashes. It’s not intentional, it’s a part of how successors are picked. And our progressives (which includes a lot of Republicans) have been doing that for about three generations, since they became “the man.”
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I think they’ll have to be either very lucky or very competent to avoid what i see happening in a few months, when people start filling out their 2013 tax returns. Just the flood of people really irritated by the box they have to check for “insurance coverage” will be something, but it’s really going to hit the fan when the IRS starts dinging refund checks. For a lot of low-information voters, that’s going to be the first concrete experience with Obamacare. I’m guessing they’ll still be quite irritated come the Nov. 2014 elections.
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Which is why I fully expect them to slip the penalty piece of the grand experiment by a year. The Libs have this fantasy of retaking the House and setting things right (in their twisted disfunctional vision of right) in the last two years of Obama rule. In moments of rationality and clarity some of them must realize that hitting the low information base in April with a November election coming up is not the smartest of plans.
The American family has lost mom and dad. The founding fathers and mothers have long since passed away and we have been put in the care of foster parents with a serious credit addiction of which they are in complete ant total denial. They have raped and pillaged our trust funds for their daily excesses and are well on the way to mortgage our entire future worth. Since there is nowhere to run and no higher power readily accessible to plead our case to there is only one recourse left to us.
Invest in precious metals, brass and lead are looking better all the time. On a related note, I see that EPA regulations have caused closure of the last remaining lead smelter in the US. Lead ore will now be shipped to other countries and the metal reimported. We still use a great deal of the stuff in everything from bullets to car batteries, so expect those prices to jump fairly soon.
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“On a related note, I see that EPA regulations have caused closure of the last remaining lead smelter in the US. Lead ore will now be shipped to other countries and the metal reimported. We still use a great deal of the stuff in everything from bullets to car batteries, so expect those prices to jump fairly soon.”
So we’ll be operating again under the same economic conditions we revolted against the British Empire to overthrow.
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On another subject, are you all away that Rand Paul is introducing a proposed constitutional amendment requiring government to live by the rules they impose on the citizenry?
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Does anyone really expect to get 2/3 of the House and 2/3 of the Senate to vote “aye” on such an Amendment?
I like a lot of what Rand Paul says, but this one is just grandstanding.
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No. It’s running for president. He’s establishing very clearly what he stands for.
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Grandstanding isn’t so bad. It’s a good way to get people talking and thinking. It’s a concept that soaks into the popular consciousness and makes people more skeptical of each new benevolent system that Congress dreams up.
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Oh, I’m not really criticizing Rand. Just reminding people that it’s, quite frankly, not going to happen.
Here’s a question though: has anybody ever tried to file suit that Congressional exemptions from laws were unconstitutional on 14th Amendment grounds (equal protection)? Have the courts actually decided on that?
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I don’t have an honest answer for you TWIB, but my understanding is that in order to get anything changed through the court system a potential plaintiff would have to prove that having Congress exempted from the law harms him. If he can’t then there’s no case.
I could be wrong about that, but I _think_ that’s how it goes.
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Yes — it is relatively easy to get a judge to declare plaintiff lacks standing in re government policy.
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But if he’s fined, is that not harm?
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Not necessarily — although there is a current case due for hearing (IIRC) next February to overturn the subsidies offered by the Feds through the Fed-run state-exchanges which might address this.
Keep in mind that when you sue the government you pay your costs out of pocket with no assurance of being made whole, while the government pays its costs with a)money it printed and b) money its black hole of debt sucked out of taxpayers’ pockets and there is very little pressure on it to contain costs.
More experienced minds than mine would have to address the level of fine required before the courts deem you to have standing or whether that is even relevant to the issue. Our court system adheres to Law and Politics, not Logic.
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Anent that suit in February — I just glanced across at my “News Screen” and saw it had been left on this relevant item:
A New Court Battle for ObamaCare
The killer loophole the Obama administration didn’t see coming.
By Arnold Ahlert · Oct. 23, 2013
In a bombshell development that could potentially cripple ObamaCare, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman ruled that the lawsuit aimed at blocking health care subsidies in states not running their own healthcare exchanges could move forward. The judge denied a request by U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to dismiss the suit, but also declined to grant a preliminary injunction sought by the plaintiffs in the case. Friedman has promised to rule on the overall merits of case by mid-February.
The plaintiffs in Halbig v. Sebelius contend that the Affordable Healthcare Act offered states a series of “carrots and sticks” to encourage them to set up healthcare exchanges. According to the suit, the biggest carrot was the offer of insurance premium subsidies, in the form of refundable tax credits from the U.S. Treasury, to low- and moderate-income resident in states that set up the exchanges. If a state refused, the stick was a federally-established, federally-run exchange with no subsidies at all.
The suit notes that, despite clear statutory language limiting premium assistance to states that set up their own exchanges, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) established its own regulation, the Subsidy Expansion Rule, authorizing subsidies in states with federally-run exchanges. In doing so, the IRS ignored the text of the law, as well as “the clear limitations Congress imposed on the availability of federal subsidies.”
[MORE]
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I think Paul’s purpose is to force them to go on the record voting against, providing fodder for campaign attack ads when it comes time for reelection.
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yes.
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ACK! I read (okay skimmed) this before you got a bajillion comments and I quoted some of it at Journey of a kitten (http://kittensjourney.org) and I desparately want to ETA a good solid definition of “Odd.” I am, but I thought your definition would be easier to find than it is….do you have a concise definition or do I need to glean it from your various dens on the ‘net.
Thanks, and hugs,
kitten
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Kitten,
Here’s the post where Sarah talked about “Odds”:
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2012/05/16/odds-2/
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WordPress allowed me to post two comments, and now I’m locked out again. I keep getting “Sorry, that comment cannot be posted.” Nothing about why or anything else. I’m getting frustrated with WordPress!
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WP is why my avatar is back to lime green from red. I had to switch after WP started refusing to let me post unless I logged into my proto-blog, and I don’t have all the passwords yet (long story).
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Oh and 3800 words (and please may this be the last dull-ish bit [political discussion]) and no miles. But I also cleaned house and practiced the music for next week’s concert.
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I get that when I have the blog open in two different tabs and log in on one. I need to refresh the other. (No solution for any other situation.)
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One facet of all consuming statist bureacratic dictatorships that is seldom remarked on is just how incredibly corrupt they are. For instance, it is very likely the Soviet Union would have collapsed decades earlier without the Russian Mafia ‘helping’ the economy along.
Eventually, excess regulation brings about Black Markets, bribery, and massive nocompliance, or just a token gesture to following the regs while the regulators look the other way.
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Yep. A lot of countries from soft socialist to communist are only afloat because of crime.
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We’re overcriminalized, overlawyered, overlitigated. Heinlein was right, there should be a committee of Congress whose sole job is to revise the US code by recommending big chunks of it that are obsolete, redundant, or OBE for repeal.
And while we’re at it, there’s pretty big chunk of the executive branch that need some pruning also.
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I think there’s a better solution. All laws expire at the beginning of the fiscal year, unless explicitly renewed by legislation in the previous FY; and no legislation may exceed 500 pages, and there must be a week between sending final version of the bill to the floor and the final vote.
Eventually they’ll be spending all of their time reauthorizing old garbage so they won’t be able to come up with new garbage.
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‘Twere I president (wha….hee-hah!…oh my great salty cashews…*snigger-snort*….yu-yu-yu-you?…*mwa-ha-ha-hack!*)
Ahem. As I was saying, I’d spend all my time with pruning sheers in hand. Occasionally a chain saw. Frequently with a wood chipper close by. Emulate the Amazonian farmers. Slash and burn, baby, burn.
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Missed my nesting under Mr. DiNote immediately preceding me.
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, Another link from Instapundit about my senator, Ted Cruz.
http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2013/10/23/ted-cruz-won/
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Since 1970 Texas has elected to the senate Ted Cruz, John Cornyn, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Phil Gramm, Lloyd Bentsen and John Tower.
In that same period North Carolina has elected Kay Hagan, Richard Burr, Elizabeth Dole, John Edwards, Lauch Faircloth, Terry Sanford, John P. East, Robert B. Morgan and Jesse Helms
I’d say Helms vs Bentsen is pretty much a wash, same with Liddy and Kay Bailey. Burr, East & Faircloth might equal about half of Gramm and Cornyn if one is generous and I’d just as soon forget about the remainder of the comparison.
Oh well – it could be worse. I could live in Massachusetts.
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Well, consider California’s contributions to the Senate since 1970:
John Tunny (D, betrayer of Angola, basis for movie “The Candidate,” 1 term and out to marry ), Alan Cranston (D, 4 terms), S.I. Hayakawa (R, 1 term), Pete Wilson (R, 1 1/2 terms, left to serve as CA Governor), John Seymour (R, 1 yr), Dianne Feinstein (D, 4+ terms, current senior Senator from California) Barbara Boxer (4 terms, current junior Senator from California).
Wilson was good, Cranston was meh, and the current two are really good at getting re-elected.
In looking these up I ran across a real “times have changed in California” item: Gerald Ford carried the state of California when Jimmy Carter won in 1976.
Boy would that never happen now.
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oops – that first one should have read:
John Tunny (D, betrayer of Angola, basis for movie “The Candidate,” 1 term and out, then to marry a Swedish Olympic ski champion)
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Massachusetts is probably the worst — when two years of Scott Brown is your highlight you’ve got a Charlie Sheen level problem. Feinstein is at least not horrible on National Security (given California’s Democrat House members that is pretty good) and Babbling Babs Boxer was Hillary Clinton’s sister-in-law (anyone who has seen Bruce Herschensohn can only dream of the alternate universe we’d inhabit had he defeated Boxer in her first senate run.).
Illinois may hold the record for most bad senators since 1970, although Ohio, with twenty years of Howard Metzenbaum merits special recognition.
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I was mentioning Ted Cruz because he is so unusual.
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Why is the first thing that came to my mind “I am the new number two. You are number six.”
My sense is that the coming regulatory state is somewhere between the nightmarish “Brazil” and the nefariousness of “the Prisoner”.
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This is the vile progs’ utopia.
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These SOBs are going to turn us into those horrible “rules don’t apply to me” folks that annoy me so….
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??? Found at TownHall-dot-com — use embedded link in headline to access multiple links embedded in the article.
Poly-Sci classes will be, one way or another, analysing this turkey for decades.
Six Week ObamaCare Individual Mandate Delay?
Carol Platt Liebau | Oct 23, 2013
Over the summer, Republicans sought a delay of the ObamaCare individual mandate, and passed a bill to that effect in the House. Of course, in the Reid-controlled Senate, it went nowhere at all.
And during the debate over the CR — and during the government shutdown — Obama/Reid insisted that delay of the individual mandate was not negotiable. At all. And the government remained shut down.
But tonight, we learn that scarcely three weeks after refusing to open the government by negotiating at all over the Republican proposal to delay the individual mandate . . . the administration is going to delay the individual mandate by six weeks! Note that — as with the delay of the employer mandate — Obama would rather do it by administrative fiat than through the proper legislative process.
Of course, the administration and its supporters are claiming that this isn’t really a “delay” of the individual mandate; rather, it’s a “tweak” to it, intended to make the date for when the individual mandate kicks in consistent with the deadline for shopping for a policy in the ObamaCare “marketplace.” Whether the delay/”tweak” has occurred because even the Obama administration realizes what a train wreck the Healthcare.gov site is — or whether it simply corrects yet another “glitch” in a terribly-drafted law — it does mean that the Obama administration has extended the time when the individual mandate is not in effect. That’s a delay . . . just 46 weeks less than the “terrorists” and “arsonists” in the GOP sought.
Don’t expect much more of this kind of “tweaking,” however. Even if the Healthcare.gov site continues to malfunction and people really can’t buy insurance online, chances are there will be no more delays. The problem for the administration in delaying the ObamaCare individual mandate much longer is this: If everyone isn’t required to buy insurance by the end of March, then only the sickest or oldest or otherwise most expensive patients will enter the pool — accelerating the insurance “death spiral.” Keep in mind, however, that since young, healthy people will find it cheaper to pay a penalty and remain uninsured until they are sick and expensive patients (who can’t be denied coverage because of a “preexisting condition”), there’s still no guarantee the “death spiral” won’t happen anyway.
Every day, the poor design of the law — and the Obama administration’s high-handed impulses in administering it — become ever clearer.
Carol Platt Liebau is an attorney, political commentator and guest radio talk show host based near New York. Learn more about her new book, “Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Hurts Young Women (and America, Too!)” here.
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Shouldn’t the title of this post be “We Free Men” ?
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That causes too much confusion over whether the middle word is an adjective or a verb.
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The answer is “Yes.”
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Goody! Is there a limit per household, or can we take as many as we want? :D
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I think you’re looking for Mens R Us.
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Sure, as many as you want, but they are six inches tall and blue. And known for a careless attitude to title to property …
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They are kind of like free puppies, all cute and cuddly when you get them, and you don’t have to pay anything for them. But you have to maintain them and clean up after them for the rest of their lives.
Now how many do you want? :)
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I know you’re joking, but… just finished fixing a wiring situation my husband “fixed” for me….
Instead of plugging the laptop into the 5 outlet breaker, which has only one thing on it, he moved 60 pounds of stuff and plugged it into the thingie I had to unscrew and attach the outlet bar to, so it’s grounded…finding this out meant that I pulled the bleeping outlet out, requiring a reset of my alarm and the only working light in the room… after the sun set, ‘cus that’s how I roll…
He does so much, but sometimes he really does set up a Janga! of an issue!
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In Clayton Cramer’s “My Brother Ron”, Clayton discussed Reagan’s efforts to remove the able-bodied from the Social Security Disability rolls. While it was something that needed to be done, it meant that schizophrenics who didn’t have family members to help with the paperwork would lose their income, and would then be even more inclined to wander the streets, than they already were, after efforts at deinstitutionalization.
Even so, this particular thought didn’t occur to me until this post! (And if anyone needs health care, surely it’s the schizophrenics among us!)
This post is a good reminder that schizophrenics aren’t the only ones who have difficulty with paperwork. (I, for one, can fill it out if I have to, but I have such distaste for it that I’ve decided not to apply to a place or two for work, just because I didn’t want to fill out their onerous application…)
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