Yesterday, on twitter — yeah, I only go there for five minutes, morning and evening, to echo my posts, but sometimes it’s enough to hit my face on some kind of stupid — I came across someone, almost for sure European, screaming at a friend.
My friend had commented on the idiot desire by the current maladministration to raise our taxes. My friend was particularly — as he should be — exercised about progressive taxes, a system that always ends up punishing the middle class (of course) and which destroys the economy in the process. And this complete ass called him an idiot by saying that if only our taxes were higher, we’d have better education and our medical system wouldn’t be falling apart.
I think I was very rude. I sometimes am. And the stupidity in that comment was too glaring to be ignored.
First, of course, most Europeans have no idea what our taxes are. Hell, most Americans don’t. They get told our taxes are low, and this is usually federal taxes, but it completely ignores that we also have state taxes, local taxes, property taxes, sales taxes.
Better people than I have added it all up, and in most places we’re giving at least half if not most of our earnings to government. Our real taxation is much higher than in Europe.
So, why are our “education” and “health” falling apart? Why indeed?
Well, it could be because since the early twentieth century our government has been running on the older and crazier European model, which is explicitly excluded from our governance by the constitution.
It could be because neither health nor education are a legitimate province of the government for a self-governing people who wish to remain so.
Sure, local governments might do what they will with education. Maybe. At least when the insane bastages which always seem to gravitate to positions of government and power are doing intolerable things or more likely things utterly divorced from reality, because they can, you can go surround their houses with torches and pitchforks, which seems to get their attention sharpish-like.
As for health, it is find for charities and wealthy individuals to be encouraged to concern themselves with the plight of the indigent and suffering. For many centuries it was preached by the churches, and even the non-religious do-gooders. (Education too, for that matter.)
Only an European — spit — would think that either education or health are a legitimate province of the government. And that’s because they still have rats in their heads from when absolute kings had rights over the everything of their subjects as though they belonged to the king as his play things. And they apparently have forgotten how those regimes ended. (A la lanterne. It might behoove the Americans who thought the Europeans had the right idea to contemplate that. Maybe they have. I’ve noticed that a lot of lampposts are now made so they have no cross piece. Probably a coincidence.)
Particularly in a continent-sized country like ours, to deliver the responsibility and right for your most intimate decisions to a massive and indifferent bureaucracy staffed by people who have attended “the best colleges” and see you as unwashed peasants, and who have no idea how large the country is in fact, or how varied the means of living in it, is …. as stupid as we’re finding out.
Though for my money, both Great Britain and Canada, smaller countries with easier to understand needs, are hitting their nose on that first.
Because surrounding the capital is much harder, and just the expense in torches and pitchforks will bankrupt your average middle class. (Maybe. I’d say in the next five years all over the world we’ll test this.)
I don’t need to do an hypothetical. The money spent on education per state is available on line. And as it climbs the quality of education declines.
As for health, no one — not even the hospitals — knows how much health services really cost. The thrice damnable interference of the government in health, starting with medicaid and medicare has distorted the price structure by removing the patient from responsibility or right to oversee his own treatment. The government pays whimsically and in ways that have nothing to do with the right decisions for the patient.
This was made worse by — really spit — Obama care which dictated what insurances should cover and shouldn’t cover. And if you think the surge in “trans” everything isn’t related to the fact that all insurances are mandated to cover it and that hospitals are starved for money, you’re most trusting than I am.
Even the most mundane of decisions my doctor wants to make for my care — and keep in mind that we do have very good (for our time insurance) — are now captive of “insurance” “approving.” Fortunately our doctor is as irritated by this as I am, so when I vent he just sighs and doesn’t take it personally. But seriously: after my doctor examines me, looks at my tests, and spends time in thought, he must still defer his decision on what medicines or procedures I should have to faceless bureaucrats far away, who are looking at me not as an individual with an admittedly quirky biology (for various reasons) but as a statistical blip.
(For years, while we tried to follow as low carb a diet as possible (diabetes in both families) we were harangued on how we should mostly eat cereals and carbs. Which I understand is, in fact, okay for a lot of people, but certainly not for us.)
So if something works for 90% of the people, then it should work for me. According to people who were never trained in medicine and who only see numbers and statistics.
This is probably why “medical intervention” is right now our leading cause of death. (Yes, they call it medical error, but is it the doctor’s or the system’s?)
Look, the problem is that you’re not making the decisions, the government is. And the government makes decisions according to its priorities.
Your priority might be to stay alive as long as possible, because you have books to write, and you think you’re making a contribution to the world. But the government will look at the ledger as you age, and see the price climbing, and your tax bill falling, and at some point you become a liability.
The same with education. You might want your kid to learn the things he or she needs to be a well-rounded individual who does well in life and is happy. But the government wants your kid above all not to cause trouble. So whatever needs to be taught so your kids just go along with whatever the government wants is what gets taught. And if they think — they do — there are too many people, they might prefer it if your kids get maimed so they don’t reproduce. And all of this is easier if they don’t read too well, can’t do math, and can’t look up the wealth of information available on line. Because, you know, keeping pets is always easier than containing self-actuated individuals you’re annoying.
No matter how much you pay in taxes, most of the money will go to the bureaucrats whose priorities are to grow bureaucracy and treat you like a farm animal.
The way to get out of that bind is not to pay more taxes, but to get government back within its constitutional restraints and push everything not specified in the constitution to the local government or the individuals. And if the individuals actually can read and research, they should keep most of it to themselves.
The more money you pay to an indifferent third party to look after you, the less you’ll like the way they look after you.
And before you talk of compassion and ending suffering: There’s only one way to end human suffering permanently. Look at Canada. They’re leading the way. They’ll now cheerfully treat you for feeling sad or being poor. The treatment is death. As it always ends up being.
Keep government poor. You always get more of what you buy, and we have enough of government.
And keep its big beak out of anything but protecting our borders (ah), negotiating with foreign potentates, and maintaining relations between states (ah) so they don’t degenerate into war.
Everything else? Take it state, take it local, take it personal.
Because the other way it always ends in death. There are no exceptions. The larger the government the higher the chance of mass graves.
In the end that’s all taxes buy.
According To Hoyt 
The “rich” pay proportionally more tax in the US than in just about every country in the world — this always surprises people abroad who believe what they read. Fools.
Donald Trump is the only President I can think of who actually raised taxes on the rich when he had the local tax deduction eliminated. I had glorious fun pointing this out to my relatives and neighbors who won’t admit that they are the rich. It cost me so I had skin in it, which made it more effective.
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Cost us too, middle sister & BIL, all our children. Didn’t affect mom (doesn’t pay feds or state, not enough income). Didn’t affect youngest sister, BIL, and most their kids. Not because they (at least sister & BIL) aren’t rich, but because they live in Washington (state), and deducting $ paid out in sales tax, hasn’t been deductible in decades.
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Yeah living in Mass the year that came into law hurt. Normally I balance stuff so US pays me a little back (to avoid penalties) and MA state is flat or owes a little bit (easier with a flat rate income tax. Thank you Mr. Adams for the the constitutional rule that like items must be taxed equally so for the present Mass supreme court has followed them with that). That year I owed a couple grand to Uncle Sugar.
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Not anymore (get to that in a minute), but what we tried to do was owe just a smidge ($100-ish) to the state and the feds. Toward the end, with everything changing, we’d get back from the state owe the feds, not change a thing, the next year get back from the feds, and pay the state. We couldn’t figure it out. Now? We are getting a lot back from both. Can’t change what we are withholding without going to 0% (already set as low as the systems allow) and filing quarterly. Problem with federal is we are never sure how much of SS is going to be taxed. State it has been the kickers. It isn’t a lot back with either, usually, but we despise giving either free interest loans.
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Define “rich”. The way our tax code actually works in the real world, the Truly Rich (by which I mean about 0.1%) pay a significantly LOWER tax rate than the Payer Class of professionals, skilled craftsmen, and small businessmen. There are tax shelters that the Truly Rich can exploit which a Payer can’t.
Example: In 2011, Mitt Romney made $11 million, on which he paid 12% Federal income-income tax (as opposed to Social Security income tax). In that same year, Mike M. (that’s me) made $110K…on which I paid just under 18% Federal income-income tax.
Am I rich? I sure as hell don’t think so. My 1,800 square foot townhouse in an exurb is no rich man’s mansion. My 10-year-old car is no rich man’s limousine. And scrimping for an every-other-year trip to Europe is no rich man’s vacation.
I don’t say anyone should pay a higher rate of tax than I do. I say that NOBODY should pay a LOWER rate of tax than I have over the past decade.
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You’re comparing apples to oranges. Capital gains and dividends are taxed at a lower rate than earned income. Since capital gains and dividends are double taxed, that rate ought to be zero. Also, by world standards you’re as rich as Croesus. We Americans have no notion just how rich we are.
The top 1% paid almost 40% of all Federal income taxes paid. In fact, the top 1% paid 50% more in absolute dollars than the total paid by the bottom 90%.
In a US context the top 1% is around $550,000 or so.
Sales taxes and other local taxes add to that of course. Sales taxes really hit the poor, which explains why the left loves VAT since keeping the poor poor is what the left us all about. That changes the percentages but still leaves the 1% paying about 25%. To add context, Germany and France are around 12%. Norway and Sweden around 9%
Look, I agree life is not fair and that the very rich can move their money offshore to (e.g.,) trusts in Fiji like the Kennedy’s, but the rich do pay proportionally more.
Funny how we know what Rodney’s rate is, but don’t know (e.g.,) Obama’s, never mind where the money for his three walled compounds came from.
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I don’t know if it’s one of your three, but Barry acquired the property at which they filmed the Robin Masters Estate exteriors for the (original, real) Magnum PI series on the east shore of Oahu, then tore everything down to build his own thing there.
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There’a about 30 trillion dollars of the really rich sitting untaxed in various shelters, offshore and onshore. Might be more according to some forensic accountants.
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Unless it’s income it’s not taxed. Think about the alternative for a minute. Then ask yourself why that’s what they go on about, why you know that, and who told you.
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If it is in a brokerage account it isn’t taxed until assets are sold, which gains are offset against losses. Or dividends, even if reapplied into more shares, which are not offset against losses. If everything is in IRA/401(k), then not taxed until distributed as income. If in Roth, gains are not taxed at all. These things we can take advantage of (if not on the scale of the top 20% to 1%).
Then there are trusts. To those who might know. Guessing the trusts (baring not being non-profit/endowments) as an entity, pay taxes on assets net gain sold and dividends (by definition, no income otherwise). But do payouts to recipients get taxed? We don’t have a trust.
Actual known situation, and this maybe a trust exception, because technically an inheritance. Cousins have a family trust that was setup for them and their parents. On their parents deaths, this trust is being paid out on a specific schedule to the three children, and grandchildren, administrated by oldest child. Are those trust payments taxed. Note, trust was taxed on inheritance tax when uncle died (aunt was extremely angry because they thought they had gotten around the estate taxes by creating the trust), then estate taxes again when aunt died. (Yes, not only Oregon estate taxes, but federal estate taxes too, at least when uncle died. Might have paid down enough over the three years for aunt’s living expenses and travel, to go below federal estate taxes when aunt died. But IDK.)
OTOH, the “trust” I get my monthly pension from, that distribution is taxable as income (not that I’d be paying on it, if it was the only payment we were getting, but $121/month does add to the total monthly income).
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Pretty sure the meaning was “It is over there, where its work/income/growth is taxed to the benefit of someplace else, instead of here, benefiting the USA.
Trump and others wanted a break on taxes to repatriate that money back into -our- economy, where it does more good for us. A patriot might accept a 1-2% greater tax burden for patriotism. Most folks are wise to go for the best break when it is much larger than that. In some cases, taxes paid there versus here is hugely less. Else there money would never have left.
even 1% of the gains from 30 trillion dollars working here is way more than zero for it doing so elsewhere. Progtards cannot comprehend that “I moved it, thus pay nothing” is an option.
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Best investment returns are and have been in the US. Why put your money where it gets a lower return. Foreign direct investment into China doesn’t really come from here, sure there’s some but the vast majority came from Japan and Taiwan, yep Taiwan. This is why China has to borrow two dollars for every dollar of GDP and has done for a long time. no one wants to put their money there,
Companies putting plant there is different, but the companies don’t own the plants and the investment to build them didn’t come from here.
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The rich own a lot. The people who pay a lot are the high earners. By taxing them so highly, the chances they will accumulate enough to rival the rich are lessened.
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You don’t get rich by earning, that’s management. You get rich by inventing something new and taking risk — or inheritance, though that’s much less an issue in the US than in Europe — They’re trying hard to change that, which is why you now have manager billionaires instead of richer shareholders.
What’s going on now is the rise of credentialed management/bureaucrat. They’re the real enemy. the politicians are just a symptom.
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You -do- get rich by earning. “Inventing something” or “taking risk” makes you rich by earning from it. People who get rich learn early on to make their outgo less than their earnings, from whatever sources. They put every free dollar to work making more. Their actions are based on a positive. Thus they accumulate.
The thinking that leads to saying “you have to invent something to get rich” tends to prevent getting rich, where “rich” means “pile up a bunch of value/wealth/money” free and clear. Because if you cannot comprehend it, or believe it, it is unlikely you will bring it about.
You get rich a dollar at a time. Sometimes that rate is faster or slower, but as long as it is positive, you are getting richer. Your choices can accelerate that, or slam on the brakes.
Examples abound.
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“Tis it better to have $30 now? Or save a penny today, save two pennies tomorrow, save 4 pennies, the next, each subsequent day doubling the prior days savings?”
Asking for a friend.
Sarcasm aside, I know the answer. Do you?
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Don’t be obtuse. You never get rich working for someone else, or didn’t until very recently, which is the problem.
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High earnings give you something to invest.
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And the Leftroids screamed bloody murder that taxes went up on the rich.
Because the -effective- tax went up on rich Leftroids. There wasn’t a built-in dodge for them.
How many presidents donated back their salary to the Treasury?
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None. Not even President Trump did. He tried to not take the presidential salary. But that was unconstitutional. Even over paying it back in taxes was not
allowed?feasible. Thus the annual donations of salary to different causes and underfunded programs.LikeLike
Since when is it unconstitutional to donate back ones federal salary to the treasury? There is a box for it on the 1040. Enter the amount you wish to pay over and above taxes due. Write the check. Done.
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Didn’t make sense to me either. But someone, not on President Trump’s team, was screaming about it. Granted it would have been perceived to have been applied against taxes that President Trump was fighting legally over in other venues. I can see why the more public route taken was chosen.
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“The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased [sic] nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.” Article II, Sec. 1. US Constitution.
I suspect someone [lawyer] decided that the wording means that the POTUS must accept a salary, or be in violation of the Constitution.
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We need a government small enough to be drowned in a bucket, and then we need a bucket. A big one.
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You don’t need a really big bucket if you have a dissolving agent of sufficient strength and an overflow area to contain the resulting sludge.
We don’t want anything to crawl back out of said bucket.
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I stand corrected, and I like the way you think.
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There is nowhere you could legally dispose of the resulting toxic sludge.
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But the agencies that regulate that would be part of the sludge so….
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It’s so nice when problems solve themselves.
And won’t the inside walls of the fusion chamber(s) need something that won’t be missed to protect them, and won’t be harmed by intense heat and high neutron flux?
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Please don’t expose our bureaucrats/ brahmandarins to high neutron flux. Yes 1000 Grays would kill 99.9% of them but if one or two survive we could have mutant bureaucrats and given they seem to reproduce asexually (given they cant tell male from female) there’ll boatloads of the damned (literally) things before you know it…
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Fighting a super-powered bureaucrat: filling, filing in triplicate, notarizing, appealing, re-filing, reviewing, appealing again, and finally you think you’ve successfully ran the paperwork gauntlet, only to hear:
“This is not even my final form.”
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The one must simply, lather, rinse, repeat.
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That sounds like the plot of “Lawyers in Hell.”
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Yes I believe it would be important to carefully research in what order you, er, dissolve the various governmental agencies.
Start with the ones most likely to cause trouble first. Especially if everyone is working from home. No one gets hurt but the agency goes away.
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I recommend dissolving the entire oxymoronically-named Department of Justice and most of its agencies first (I might retain the US Marshals Service).
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Health care falling apart?
Even though I am having to raise money vie a gofundme for the knee and hand surgery I need, I expect I will still get that surgery much more quickly than the waiting lists I’d be on in Europe (if, indeed, it would be approved at all at my age or if, as a certain former President might say, I’d just have to take a pill).
I’ll take ours over anybody else’s in the world.
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What is your gofundme? I’m sure many here will contribute.
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Yes, David, please share.
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I didn’t want to coopt Sarah’s blog post for my personal ends which is why I didn’t link to it in the first place.
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But I see now that I have Sarah’s permission so:
https://gofund.me/8f574dbc
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Please do…
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YOU WILL ASK FOR HELP AND YOU WILL ENJOY IT.
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In the U.S. you wait 3 hours for an MRI. In Canada, you wait 3 months.
If you die before it’s your turn, problem solved. There’s a checkbox on the form for that.
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Twelve months if it’s for something not urgent like a genetic degenerative disease.
Why yes, I did ask the acquaintance if a spot of medical tourism was in order. She’s planning it right now.
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One reason that there ate a lot of Canadian license plates on cars parked at clinics in US border cities
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I’m half expecting a Babylon Bee article on “Canadians visiting the US as medical tourists for quicker, higher quality MAID.”
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I’m waiting for the Not The Bee article: “Canadian government throwing people in jail for going to U.S. hospitals”
There is precedent. The British government arrested a boy’s parents at the airport because they were taking him to the U.S. after British National Health refused treatment. I recall reading that the kid died while they were in jail.
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‘Socialized Medicine’ — do you really want the folks that mismanage the DMV, prisons and schools in charge of your health care?
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They’re doing it to another set of parents & child right now. Denying treatment and refusing to let the family get passports so they can go elsewhere to get it.
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Because the point is to ensure that the children die. Especially that they die against their parents’ wishes and at the order of the state, to show everyone who really calls the shots.
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And if the child lives, he or she will need follow-up care that the government can’t afford to provide. Better, from the government’s view, that the child die quickly and leave resources for those who can benefit by returning to the workforce and paying taxes.
Have I mentioned how much I HATE that kind of thinking?
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I read Ezekial Emmanuel’s paper and that’s exactly how he thinks. Everyone should suicide at 75 to save resources; retired folks and the very young should get minimal treatment; the majority of resources should be focused on “productive,” members of society. In other words, the State should do a Rerurn on Investment for all citizens and anyone who won’t provide a good future return is not worth saving. Efficiency Uber alles!
I despise that thinking. Also want to know if he’ll off himself if and when he hits 75….
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“You first!” Comes to mind. (Or am I also channeling Captain Obvious?)
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That’s the kind of thing you can only pull on a disarmed population. Because you’re creating parents with nothing left to lose, and a personal vendetta against certain bureaucrats. I just wonder how long it will be until the obvious consequences happen to those bureaucrats, who thought they were immune from consequences.
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3 months? How do you figure to get it that fast? Triple it, minimum.
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When I disassembled my knee joint, the ER docs wanted an MRI, but in the midst of Covidiocy, the proper people were not available, so I got a CT scan. Good enough. “Barely”, said the surgeon.
And the doc wanted me to stay overnight post-op (gee, 2+ hours worth of surgery), but Despicable Kate Brown et al put a limit on the hospital occupancy, so $SPOUSE drove me home and $KINDLY_NEIGHBOR helped me get out of the truck and into the house. We owed him bigtime for all the help he gave. One box of expensive frozen fish later, no problem. :)
Am I holding a grudge against the COVID junta? Funny you should ask.
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A lot of people are holding grudges. Many of them weren’t allowed to be with dying parents. Or others important to them.
I am daily grateful we lived in a relatively sane area.
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My father, an 84-year-old nursing home resident with dementia and Parkinson’s (on top of previously-untreated schizophrenia) was bundled off to a hospital, in the absence of any symptoms, and murdered with Remdesivir and a ventilator so that the hospital could make more money inflating their Covid numbers and the doctors could make TikToks in the hallways and declare themselves heroes. This was, of course, AFTER eight months of being kept isolated from his family. He had profound nerve deafness, after working on aircraft for over 35 years, so we couldn’t even call him. We knew he didn’t have another 20 years, but that didn’t mean he deserved to be murdered. I will never in my life trust the medical profession again. I already knew not to trust or respect public schools or any government agencies, nor the media (but I repeat myself).
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I’m sorry.
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Thank you. As you can no doubt tell, I’m still pretty pissed about it. We couldn’t even view the body; my mom and sister got 30 seconds in front of an unzipped body bag, and then they threw him into a truck and it was off to the crematorium.
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Hugs.
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Thank you, darlin’.
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Wait until the women who would have been mothers find out what vaccination does to pregnancies…
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TBF our healthcare is straining under the weight of illegals. So is education.
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Our public education system collapsing under the strain might be a blessing in disguise. Our healthcare straining, not so much.
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Which is why I support an Immediate Expulsion policy. Criminal Invaders need to go back. One thing Eisenhower did right was to deport Mexican illegals…by ship, to ports in the south of Mexico. Not just across the border to try again.
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There are a lot of idle container ships floating around these days…
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If you expect an argument from me, you’ll be diappointed.
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I don’t, having hung around here for a while. So I’m not disappointed.
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Well said. But how did you fit all that in a tweet?
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I didn’t. I just called him names. :-P
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The U.S.
feralfederal government is the world’s biggest by a factor of at least 5.How do you measure the size of a government? I decided to use how much money it spends as a proxy for size. It is certainly a measure of how much the government affects the country. When I checked, the U.S. federal budget was over $6.8 trillion per year, almost half of it deficit spending. That’s more money than the governments of Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia and Japan spend combined.
And no, it’s not all, or even mostly, military spending. 80% of U.S. government spending is on ‘social programs’ and ‘infrastructure’ such as federal school and highway funding. Which gives the federal government a huge club to beat states into submission using money extorted from the states’ own citizens.
But that’s not enough for the ‘Progressives’. No, they want the government to spend even more, to have even more power over the states and the people.
It has to end, and the only way it can end is to prevent the federal government from levying direct taxes on the American people. Eliminate the 16th amendment, disband the IRS, sack a few million bureaucrats and put the government on a starvation diet. Maybe then we can rediscover what liberty means.
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Today, every child in America is born $139,000 in debt.
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I wonder how that compares as a percentage. I mean, our economy and population are probably bigger than those six combined, so maybe our government isn’t all that unusually big. (I don’t know; not looking up numbers or anything just speculating.)
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No, their combined population is much bigger than the U.S. Even if that were not the case, though, the sheer size of the U.S. government provides such immense scope for corruption that it dwarfs the whole rest of the world. It irresistibly draws in the corrupt, and the corruptible, and then they fester and multiply. As they have been doing for more than a hundred years.
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Why do so many idiots believe that our problems will be solved by the same shitheads that caused them?
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I was curious and looked. Wikipedia has tables based on the CIA Factbook. The US federal government has the largest budget in the world (2020 numbers) by a factor of 1.8
US federal expenditures are middle of the pack for budget per capita or as a percentage of GDP compared to countries in Europe. The other place the US federal budget is unusual is one of the highest percentage deficit to GDP.
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Somehow I read the line as foreign potatoes… Does seem to describe a certain amount of them.
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And in all too many cases, actual potatoes might be an improvement.
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An improvement on many of our domestic “potatoes,” too.
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Hmm
Feral Potatoes
Sounds like a webcomic or a bar band.
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Cow College bar band. Or a departmental off-hours band, like the one at Flat State U. (And the biology department brewing club, and …)
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As for curious and usually misguided notions that Europeans have about America – I am reminded of when I was living in Greece, and got into the habit of passing magazines like Harpers’ and Atlantic (back in the early 1980s when they were still a solid read) to my next door neighbor. Penny was English, married to a Greek, and I think starved for English-speaking culture. She loved those magazines and others that I passed to her … but she confessed to being utterly boggled at discovering that there were American publications dealing with various matters on such an erudite. serious and well-educated level. I think she had the notion that just about all Americans were sort of like the hillbillies, in Beverly Hillbillies. You know, simple and well-meaning, but utterly unscathed by matters intellectual.
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My daughter attended grad school in Europe and several friends later visited her in the U.S. They were uniformly astonished that we could afford to own a 3-bedroom home on a half-acre in a nice suburb on a schoolteacher’s pay. And serve steak for dinner! Of course, one of them (destined for the diplomatic corps, no lie) also felt free to insult our religious beliefs. Husband set him straight on that. :)
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Way back when, I hosted a former roommate’s family on holiday. They were British, the father in a high paying job.
My crappy college era factory worker shared-three-ways house was about the same square footage as theirs, and far less costly. The father insisted on paying the utilities for their two week stay, and was astonished at the low total. Yet I was splurging and running the A/C way colder than I liked, as they were cold-climate folks and this was Florida. He was expecting at least another zero tacked on.
Then they went shopping. LOL.
Then they figured out I was a “mere” factory worker. They were terribly confused.
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THIS!
On education spending: Imagine you have an incompetent employee who whines he isn’t paid enough. Is paying him more going to make him an overachiever?
Our agents (politicians) think so. Failure is not the result of high spending. High spending is the way our government rewards failure.
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Health care in the US is a system that is widely misunderstood. Most would say the patient is the buyer, and the health care provider is the seller. While it was once so, it is so no longer. Now one needs to follow the money flow to understand things: The health care provider is the seller, and the buyer is the insurance payer, whether private or government.
While nothing in health care takes place without a patient, the observant may note the patient is no longer a core part of the transaction. Indeed, most payers no longer refer to their covered people getting treatment as “patients”, but rather as “subscribers”, and many negotiations for insurance coverage and rates to be paid hinge on how many subscribers a given payer can deliver to a provider.
This is a clue to the status of the patient in the transaction: The patient is no longer the consumer or buyer, they are now one of the products in a two way exchange between provider and payer. The payer provides patients needing treatment, and the provider gives treatment and receives agreed rates.
That’s why it’s difficult for patients to get attention for issues – as the product it’s roughly like a grapefruit getting attention in the produce section.
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This. Take a look at dental or vision care, both of which have a lot more pay-as-you-go customers. It keeps prices down – quite low, considering the standard of care.
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Yes.
Technically our Medi-Advantage insurance covers dental. Problem is our dentist of almost 40 years isn’t on the approved list. So instead we pay the dental practice for our dental “insurance”. 2023 that is $370/each for annual xrays, two cleanings, and 20% discount on major dental work. The insurance pays for cleanings, and partly for xrays.
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Yep. I had one employer (maybe two, didn’t work for either that long) who paid for dental as part of the health coverage (both in the 1970s), but from ’79 to $CURRENT, it’s been on me. We tried one dentist, didn’t care for him, $SPOUSE tried a mega-chain and left in disgust, while I got pointed to a local provider who does good work for a reasonable (though decidedly not cheap) price. $SPOUSE is blessed with good teeth. Not me.
The partial dentures (preliminary set top and bottom, then final ones a year later) were a bit breathtaking, but understandable after looking at the product.
Vision care can be weird on medicare. If it’s part of a medical issue, the refraction exam might be covered. Maybe. Sometimes. If it’s coded just right. (Spectacles still are COD, but my glasses were not exotic.)
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My eye exams are split, part eyes, part medical. Most the major tests, come under major medical. Glaucoma diagnosis. Glasses, until this year, we paid for, even though technically medi advantage or insurance paid for them. Why? Because work insurance didn’t cover Costco optical and neither did current insurance (until this year). But Costco total cost for frames, lens, including “extras” like anti glare, anti-scratch, blue light filter, progressive lens, photochomatic, etc., was less that the copay where the insurance for glasses was accepted (like less than half). Now that Costco takes the medi advantage version, this year I got two pair of glasses for $219 out of pocket (insurance only paid for one pair). One pair regular photochormatic, etc., full prescription. The second pair, full prescription with all the extras except sunglasses (photochormatic doesn’t trigger behind windshields). Same setup, similar frame cost, quoted from three sources that also take the insurance (and took it before), out of pocket was almost $700. Note, first set of new (regular glasses) in 5 years (not that much of a change, in distance or reading prior. This year the distance improved, by > 25%. Reading got worst.) First new frames in over 10 years, only because the ones I’d been using were discontinued.
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If you have simple lenses (single lens or bifocal, may go up to tri but I don’t know), online is an inexpensive way to go. My anti-glare single lens are under $30.
My one sadness is that I am limited to certain styles because my nose is wide at the bridge, and I’d love to play with some of the styles that are only available in plastic. But those would hurt.
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Not simple. I use progressives, which I like a whole lot better than bifocals.
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When I informed the hospital et al that I would pay for the procedure I had this summer, the cost dropped by 50-75%. It was still ridiculous over-charging, but good grief, what they would have billed in insurance company!
(I have a reassurance policy, so I pay, then get reimbursed.)
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I’ve “heard” (no way to state “yes, this is what they do”) that the hospital, or any medical facility, sends standard charges to insurance. Insurance pays the negotiated fee minus the copay amount/percentage which the insured is responsible for. The unpaid billed amount sits on the books until it is declared as unrecoverable accounts receivable and is written off on taxes. How the non-profits deal with this, or make sense of it, isn’t clear to me.
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It depends. If one were to think that hypothetically standard contract terms between a hypothetical payer and a hypothetical network provider would hypothetically state that whatever the hypothetical payer hypothetically approves as their payment has to be considered as payment in full by the hypothetical network provider, one would not be imagining the unbelievable.
And some states have laws that forbid the practice of “balance billing” on any medical treatment, so whatever they get is it.
Uninsured is a whole ‘nother story. Write-downs there are a matter of public financial reporting for many hospitals, and are pretty enormous.
The whole US system is precariously balanced with commercial payments subsidizing government payments, and any payments subsidizing the uninsured write offs.
The big profits are also public record: Payers, moreso than providers, rake in the bottom line bucks.
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In the grand tradition of democracy, the sentence should read, “So if something works for 50% of the people plus one, then it should work for me.”
Off-the-subjct technical note: both IFTTT and Zapier have the ability to post a tweet (or whatever X is calling them now) whenever you post to your WordPress blog. That way you don’t have to go there and do it manually.
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It’s a handy ability. I’m playing a cloud-based game of Civ 6 right now, and have it set up through IFTTT to automatically drop an alert into my Discord channel when someone takes their turn.
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If someone publishes a genuine bit of truth as a snippet, is that an.. X-post-factoid?
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Groan
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I did chuckle, but it does call for a 21 carp salute. If we have the aim just right, it’ll barely miss. Maybe. :)
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Not if on Truth Social
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My wife works for a hospital in the billing department. Specifically, her team deals with “medicaid HMO denials.” Often the payer denies claims for things that they cover, even when they approved, even when filed correctly. The claim sits on someone’s desk for almost a year and then the payer will have a reason (“didn’t have our tracking number”–which is internal to the payer, not the hospital–or something equally capricious) and return it to the hospital. Then she is trying to contact them, to fix what needs fixing, and re-file. Many times the second time will be denied for “timely filing” which was brought about by the payer to begin with.
They are drowning in paperwork requirements that continually change with no notification to the service provider (the hospital).
I know I’ve completely oversimplified this. She starts talking to me about work, and I really do try to follow, but end up with my eyes glazed over.
I have no idea how any hospital manages to remain in business if they take any kind of government insurance.
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People like me who pay cash, I suspect. And overcharging private insurance.
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Your cash transaction saved the hospital an immense amount of money and time (but I repeat myself, time also being money) since they neither had to detailed-bill any insurance payer nor fight with said payer when they denied the claim or didn’t pay what they were supposed to pay under their contract.
All that overhead expense stayed right in their pocket.
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The local hospital only offered a 30% discount for non-insured. The sticker shock came when I tried a finger stick at the fancy dialysis/Coumadin testing clinic and got a base charge of $100. I used to go to a (scary, but affordable) public clinic and they charged a hair above the consumables cost, some $12.
Either they were recovering fees lost from Medicare dialysis, or their overhead was horrendous, or “other”. (Not excluding “and”.) It was a nicely appointed office…
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very much this. especially “overcharging” those with coverage (tylenol at Dollars a pill etc),
Also the methodology of the feds drives together the medicos so they have less separate entities they deal with, giving them a defacto NHS division they can lord over by driving Doctor Bob into Tenet/Aurora/Bellin/etc in self defense
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THIS. We went from solo and small practice physicians into mega corp healthcare in no time. Used to say, heading doctors was worse than getting cats. Now, they just herd corporations and the docs are afraid to say boo. Or have quit.
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Herding docs was worse than herding cats. Sorry
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A LOT have quit.
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Remember, the purpose of any Government health care scheme is to employ administrators. Ditto for schools, especially colleges. The British National Health Service has more administrators than doctors and nurses combined. And there are several colleges that have more administrators than students.
All those Useless Studies majors have to find work somewhere….
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The purpose of any bureaucracy is to employ bureaucrats. They generate mountains of meaningless busywork which requires still more bureaucrats to deal with it. 0bamacare greatly expanded the government-medical bureaucracy while driving doctors, nurses and hospitals out of medicine. This on top of arbitrarily rationing their numbers in the first place.
After what the government has done, it’s a wonder we have any health care at all.
———————————
The government rewards failure and punishes success.
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The Iron Law of Bureaucracy remains the Iron Law.
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“It’s okay. There are enough trees, should it come to that” is what a friend told me once
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And don’t forget the traffic lights.
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Helicopters and woodchippers!
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Do you know how hard it is to hover precisely over a running woodchipper? You have to take into account the shifting payload, , the winds down that low, and…
Oh, wait, you meant as separate options.
Nevermind…
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Have a contest between pilots and put it on pay per view, use the proceeds to pay off the national debt. More points if they get in the chipper. Call it ‘The Dropping Man’. sarc
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Think of it as a skill challenge….
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Electric poles. Heck even cell towers.
There are other alternatives that don’t require rope, but are not a visible reminder of what happened. Just as long as it is the sea, not land. I don’t mind providing sharks or predatory fish with snacks but teaching land predators like cougars, wolves, bears, to hunt humans, even despicable ones, is a very, very, very, bad idea.
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feed them to pigs. That way they’re recycled into something useful, for the first time in their existence.
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Pre-mass-processing by Madam la Guillotine, they used lampposts because that’s what they had. Look around now: Lots of quite robust overpasses around and about.
That said, those overpasses have long nice sight lines too, and there are lots and lots of trained applicators of precision distance kinetics these days, to say nothing of drones and suchlike. We are not France 1789.
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Nor are we France 1793. For which we should be very grateful.
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Not from any lack of trying by the Loony Left…
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You plebes and your silly boycotts…..
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/bill-gates-backs-bud-light-with-95-million-bet-5487135
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The more money they pay propping up bad investments, the less money they have for politicians.
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THIS
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All Hail Albert Jay Nock!!
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Thank you for sending me looking. I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of Albert Jay Nock until now.
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You are quite welcome! Not a popular writer with our ‘elites’. The state is our enemy. Contrary to everything preached by Mussolini.
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“Death and Taxes”
Government excels at both, and not much else.
Another reason “best is least”.
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Let me address the medical errors thingy. It is NOWHERE as high as they keep reporting!! We have”algorithms” and”best practices” that we are supposed to follow, whether or not they apply to the patient in front of you. Deviate and some paperpusher can call it”medical error”. Sometimes it doesn’t apply, sometimes the patient refuses for whatever reason, sometimes there is no good choice and you picked the best available, or a huge host of other acceptable reasons. My evidence is 40 years in the field and there have been VERY few deaths that I even heard of from true medical error, certainly nowhere near the “leading cause of death”.
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They want to destroy the trust people have in anything, it helps them to not differentiate between elites. All elites/education bad. You can only trust our kind of elites in daddy government. Everything but the government line is wrongthink. It is also why they came down so hard on doctors during the covidacity.
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Eh. It’s not working. We despise the government most of all. On account of being Americans.
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If they knew what they were doing and weren’t hampered by their own policies they would be winning. They are not, why, because we are Americans. So yes I agree.
Just look at all the Sanctuary Cities and how fast they are collapsing. You wanted the poor, you wanted the immigrants. And Daddy Joe gave them to you. So buck up Butter Cup Adams. This is what you voted for. This is exactly what you New Yorker’s voted for. Now shut up and pay for what you liberal morons voted for. Laws and elections have consequences as that Communist whore Obama used to say.
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I SUSPECT it’s mostly insurance. At this point I have to go see a specialist for a minor thing my doctor could prescribe for. BUT the insurance is pushing all these crazy treatments, and he says he’s not risking them.
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I remembered how much the Euros freaked after Trump started talking about how NATO was obsolete. If Uncle Sugar doesn’t take care of their defense needs can they even afford all the social programs like “free Medical care” they look down on us for not having?
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Yup. They scorn the men who secure their very existence.
There are some in NATO who at least in public express respect. Some may even be genuine. Noteworthy are the ones that exceed their obligations, concealing how much they exceed, not short.
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Probably not, no.
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RE: taxation.The more I think about it the more convinced I am we’re Doing It Wrong. Instead of taxing the individual, the federal bill should go to state legislatures. Establish a baseline share for border protection, national defense and international relations (all of which, in their present form, are severely broken, probably irretrievably so) everything federal above that is negotiable and up to the state legislators to approve for how much of it, and at what level, their state will fund. The state legislators then bill their citizens appropriately for the use of either federal or state resources to meet specified need(s).
That, and moving the entire federal capital operation into non-D.C. rented space that shifts every dozen years or so would tend to slough off at least part of the parasitic load as the moving vans cycled between places like Omaha, Sioux Falls, Bangor and Amarillo.
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This is about where I am. I think there may be some space to start with state level approaches rather than hoping solely for the feds to change. Probably not possible with border issues, since constitutionally federal – feds can ignore it, but their courts will likely enforce their jurisdiction to mismanage same. (This is what right-critics of Greg Abbot’s buses miss – the Feds jump on attempts to do the deportations that Border Patrol’s kept from, but making Eric Adams in NYC squirm hasn’t yet been ruled against)
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If we’re going to start up with the French Revolution metaphors, our problem today is not an excess of Louis Seizes or even Louis Quatorzes, it’s an excess of Robespierres trying to reshape society “for its own good.”
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Don’t forget all the Saint-Justs pushing from behind the scenes.
We can only remember what happened to the original Robespierre and Saint-Just in the end, and hope…
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I’m rooting for Tom Theisman. Sadly, those aren’t all that common.
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He’s from a universe which has FTL travel, treecats, and a female Lord Nelson with longevity treatments, so yeah, he’s a bit of a unicorn.
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So was George Washington…. but he’s a standard to shoot for.
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Image of Nimitz and Samantha happily BLEEKing their way happily as they buzzsaw through Parliament, Congress, etc…
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Exactly, not to mention Jean-Paul “Media Baron” Marat. I just burned through the 1999-2000 Scarlet Pimpernel series, and the fifth episode (only really good one of the second season) has Robespierre studying Davide’s “Death of Marat,” and you can tell, he’s worried about ending up the same way. Best moment in the ep, except maybe for the diving bell.
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The reason for the reference, is that there was also some justified anger. Or a lot of it. And the elites were out of touch with the people.
Now, the elites fancy themselves revolutionaries, but really, they’re just noblemen with six foot tall head dresses, with ships in them.
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Yeah, I get where you’re coming from in original post. I apologize for my first comment coming out snarkier than necessary.
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I will say this, Biden did fulfill one of his campaign promises. FJB did bring a certain amount of unity back to the nation. More Blacks, Hispanics and all other americans are joined by the idea that we hate that senile, lying, corrupt, son of a bitch.
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Several talking heads were discussing that this afternoon on FoxBusiness. (I was shelling pistachios as Mom and Dad Red watched. My thumb hates me now.)
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Here’s a joke I ran into:
A man gets a gash in his leg that needs to be taken care of. He goes to a doctor.
The American doctor says, “I can stitch that up for you right away. That’ll be $10,000, please.”
The British doctor says, “I can schedule you for treatment in six months.”
The Canadian doctor says, “Here’s the address of the nearesy assisted suicide center.”
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Simultaneously horrifying, funny, and very true. There was an article in the Economist or some such place, to the effect that mourning celebrities was kind of pointless because you don’t really know them and their best work is usually well behind them and so forth…all of which was perfectly valid so far as it went, but in retrospect the “people are usually pretty useless by the time they die” subtext was kind of off-putting.
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My whole life has been slightly out of step with the popular culture around me. I can remember everything; but the index is wonky. For example, the title reminds me of Roberta Flack’s song and that reminds me of building an Estes model rocket in my parents’ garage one summer before I graduated from high school.
ahem
Yes, as you say, Government is compulsion, not compassion. And it wasn’t for murder, extortion, illegal booze, prostitution, or jaywalking that Capone was sent to Alcatraz, it was for cheating on his taxes while not being an elected Democrat (or son of same).
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As for cross pieces for lamp posts, most home stores have a large supply of high strength shelf brackets. They can be attached to posts with large hose clamps, available at auto stores.
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“So if something works for 90% of the people, then it should work for me. According to people who were never trained in medicine and who only see numbers and statistics.”
/rant mode engaged /
Yes. If it works for the 90% it will work for you, or if not, tough schiltz.
There is a name for this. DRG. Diagnostic Related Group. It is a concept forced upon modern medicine by the insurance industry, starting as most such things have done in California. You can thank Kaiser for this, the first HMO in the United States. Health Maintenance Organizations, HMOs, function by applying the statistically derived Diagnostic Related Group to -payment- for medical professionals.
On average, taking 100,000 cases of heart attack for example, the “best” (meaning most cost effective) treatment is X drug, given at X dose, for X number of days. So that’s what they pay for. And that’s all they pay for.
Should you be the lucky lottery winner to have an issue that only turns up once in 300,000 cases, which required drug Y, the HOSPITAL is on the hook for it, not the insurance company. They only pay for drug X. (Because the hospital is required by law to treat you, but the insurance company is not required to pay for anything outside your contract.)
The purpose of HMOs and the diagnostic related group concept is to push the financial risk back onto hospitals and individual physicians. Ultimately it will be the doctor who works for free, because the patient is unlikely to pay. (Because it is hard to earn money when you are old, busted, and just had a heart attack.)
And that is why doctors will not do or say -anything- that is not under the guidelines. Partly because they won’t get paid, but mostly so they won’t get sued. In the USA suing doctors is the national sport.
For example, in some states it is next to impossible to get OBGYN coverage, because the lawsuit tail extends forever. If -anything- from a hangnail to heart failure happens to a kid delivered by Dr. Welby, 27 years ago, he will be sued. For sure. Its a given. Dr. Welby’s medical insurance bill could be medium six figures per year.
In Canada of course you can’t even sue, because socialized medicine. No doctor in Canada will step outside the guidelines, because inside they are safe. Outside the guidelines, recommending drug y which is not covered, the -government- comes after them. Lawsuits are the least of their concerns.
You, the patient, are of absolutely no importance. Nobody cares. PATIENTS don’t pay money. Insurance companies do. Patients are an annoyance and a cost, and possibly grounds for legal ruination. One lawsuit has been known to bring down entire hospital chains.
This is also true in Europe. Which is why in Europe, as an example, most hospitals don’t have air conditioning. Because nobody cares if the patient dies. The DRG was followed, treatment was delivered per the guidelines, and no one is to blame that the old lady died because there was a heat wave. Act of God, to-bad-so-sad, next please.
/rant endeth/
You can imagine how much fun it was having me for a student in medical training, right? >:D The pointed questions, oh yeah.
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RE: The cat and hose. Use your door.
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Doesn’t work. Havey knocks, and all of them SCREAM outside the door. Sigh.
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Cats and closed doors separating them from their humans. Not a good combination. Even going to the bathroom in private, because of who the other humans are in the house, is a problem. Should we close the cats out of our room, we’d hear about it all night long. They aren’t in our room all night. But block them out and they will be trying to get in the room all night.
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I did an experiment one night. My room at RedQuarters has two doors, the one the cats always want to use, and the other one. So one night, I closed and blocked the cat’s door, and left the other one open. He thumped on the closed door several times, as usual.
It was 0400 before Gigancat realized “Hey! Open door to two-foots!” and lumbered in. (Sweet cat, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer.)
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Louder, please, for the people in the back.
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