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John McCain was a total piece of shit. I'm glad he's gone.
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That's a despicable comment."The problem with quotes on the Internet is that it is sometimes hard to verify their authenticity." -Abraham Lincoln -
Let me guess. Krapture?Originally posted by AlabamAlum View PostI feel like I am watching the destruction of our democracy while my neighbors and friends cheer it onComment
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McCain's morning dump had more societal value than what Krapture will ever attain on his finest day. But Krappy does provide an unintended service - he gives pedophiles and other social outcasts someone they can legitimately look down their noses at. Its not much in the scheme of things, but he's good at it.“Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.” - Groucho MarxComment
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Talent- This one's for you and puts things better than I ever could
Why right-wing identity politics is more dangerous than left-wing identity politics ever will be. From the libertarian magazine Reason
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That's some serious head-in-the-sand thinking by that writer, and it is the reason why Libertarianism is pretty much dead.Originally posted by Dr. Strangelove View PostComment
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I had a discussion with a guy recently about this. He was arguing that the first step in controlling HC costs was to remove insurance companies and employers indirectly offering HC coverage from insurance companies as first payors. I offered a similar argument that you have done above.Originally posted by froot loops View Post
You are right but this aspect of the market place can be mitigated by standardizing policies through regulation. The car insurance industry is highly regulated. The end result is a fairly standard set of policies offered nation wide although state level regulation varies.
Going back to unpopular aspects of the ACA, mandated general and risk pool coverage, this was designed to mitigate the problem you mention above - insurance companies only want healthy patients. Of course, this was a central underpinning concept of the ACA. Without mandated coverage, the ACA would collapse on itself and with the removal of that requirement, it pretty much has defaulted back to it's pre-ACA state. HC costs continue to rise.
I still think controlling HC costs has a solution - not a simple one because of the politics but nonetheless doable. Remove insurance companies as first payors, reconnect the HC consumer to the HC delivery market place, mandate transparency in HC delivery costs and create a market place of insurance companies offering standardized coverage. The standardization of those policies would potentially derive from a federally designed regulatory scheme.
Once pricing for HC services is made available to the consumer, the consumer decides if they want to insure the costs. A healthy single 25 year old without kids knows the repair of a broken arm costs $X. He may not need any coverage or only needs a policy for a catastrophic event like a head injury; a 65 year old with heart disease and diabetes may want and need more coverage. Trust me. Hospitals and commercial HC delivery practices know exactly what just about every procedure or intervention costs. Why? Because they currently base their negotiations with HC insurers for reimbursement based on a knowledge of specific costs.
Insurance companies want to remain profitable in the HC insurance game and that's fair. So do hospitals. What is not fair is the obscene amount of profits both these entities (not all as AA points out) are taking in the current system - that system completely hidden from scrutiny by HC consumers. As in the car insurance market place, State Farm, for example, knows the cost of repairs, assesses driver risks and offers policies at a price where they anticipate profitability. The key is that they know and the consumer knows what a repair costs, they know if there is injury claim what that will cost and they know the relative risk a particular driver poses. Doing that sort of thing in the HC insurance industry is entirely doable.
Like drivers with bad driving records seeking insurance, there would be high risk patients seeking to be insured. How does a state deal with this? In Florida, home owners insurance almost uniformly excludes wind damage. There are some companies getting back into covering this but it's limited and at one point nobody was writing home owners insurance with wind damage coverage in FL. So, the state initiated a high risk insurance pool. It is a unique and highly successful program. The state set up an independent company to run the pool - Citizens Insurance. The policies have reasonable deductibles. The cost of a policy is reasonable because there are provisions in the policies that allow Citizens, the company, to assess policy owners a capped amount, determined by a percentage of the assessed value of your home, should post storm damage claims exceed the money that is in the insurance companies pool. The state regulates how much money Citizens has to keep in the pool. IOW, they can't over-price a policy and then skim profits. What they are allowed to do is profit reasonably secondary to regulation.
Bottom line: it can work. Will it ever happen? Hard to say. One of the problems is the complexity associated with knowing. Another is the money that is being made by entities operating in the current system and the lobbying effort put forward by them to keep the status quo. It's a tough problem but one that is eminently solvable.Last edited by Jeff Buchanan; March 21, 2019, 08:37 AM.Mission to CFB's National Championship accomplished. JH chased Saban from Alabama and caused Day, at the point of the OSU AD's gun, to make major changes to his staff just to beat Michigan. Love it. It's Moore!!!! timeComment
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trump needs to let McCain go
McCain was a dupe --the dossier had already made its way around the intelligence services through ohr and comey
mccains shitass move was to get it released to the press (buzzfeed) even though it was unverified crap it turns out --at the same time mccains going to the fbi about it
just a backstab moveComment
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Unrelated news, but I guess Jimmy Carter is now the longest living President as of today.Comment
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????Originally posted by Hannibal View Post
Not that I agree with everything he wrote in absolute terms but I don't think the author is trying to convince me to do that. He does lay out a good case for the destructiveness of identity politics on a strong liberal democracy dedicated to protecting the liberty of all.Mission to CFB's National Championship accomplished. JH chased Saban from Alabama and caused Day, at the point of the OSU AD's gun, to make major changes to his staff just to beat Michigan. Love it. It's Moore!!!! timeComment
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More evidence that Cindy Yang has been selling access to Trump to foreign Chinese nationals. Funny how all these people have fuzzy memories and no clue who paid or who paid for what. And surely no one is naive enough to believe this is the only handful of people who funneling are illegal foreign money to Trump
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With all the EC talk, this is worth bringing up. Expected changes in apportionment after 2020. Texas and Florida the only two states to gain 2-3 representatives. Virtually every state around the Great Lakes will lose at least one seat. But also Alabama and (possibly) California.
https://www.electiondataservices.com...s-20181219.pdf
This brings up another interesting possibility regarding "reform". What if instead of ditching the EC, we simply raise the cap on the number of Representatives above 435? That could be changed with legislation and not a constitutional amendment. In theory each member of Congress is supposed to represent just over 700,000 people. That number will only continue to get larger, at a rate faster than a lot of states grow. At the start of the 20th century it was only about 190,000.
The chart below has a column showing the number of people each electoral vote represents. In Texas, each electoral vote represents ~750,000 people. In Wyoming, it's not even 200,000. Allowing for an expansion of the House for the first time in over a century would go towards correcting the imbalance. And plenty of red states like Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, and Missouri would benefit from this as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._by_populationComment
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Michel Temer, Brazil's interim right-wing President who was a key figure in the impeachment of Dilma, has been arrested on bribery & corruption charges (it's been years since audio tapes of him soliciting bribes were made public).
Another key figure in Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, Eduardo Cunha, the former Speaker of the Brazilian House, is currently serving 15 years in prison for corruption.
So Rousseff was impeached on the basis that she was 'corrupt', yet she's never been charged or convicted by any actual court, while two of the men most responsible for removing her are in prison now due to corruption.
This was a soft coup.Comment
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Yer a soft coup.Shut the fuck up Donny!Comment
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Thats what I was saying about the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, there's no reason that the House should be 435 representatives forever. It was just how many seats were in the House in 1911.Originally posted by Dr. Strangelove View PostComment
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Yeah, I'm largely with Hannibal on this. I think the practical reality is that it is the left-wing identity politics that has hegemony and the ability to effectuate direct outcomes. Right-wing shit barely moves the needle and barely gets anything done. It's only really effective as a political tool in reaction to the gross overreach of the left.Why right-wing identity politics is more dangerous than left-wing identity politics ever will be. From the libertarian magazine Reason
There is zero chance that in the US the ethno-nationalist folks are going to ever win or control the agenda. At most you may, MAY get some sort of immigration restrictions comparable to those in, say, 2005. The Horror! Or you may end up with race-based decisions being outlawed. The Horror!
However, there is a huge chance (and according to Hannibal, an absolute certainty) that left-wing identify politics will win. And because people like the writer admire the goals thereof they WILL implement policies. Socially, they already do.
So, anyone who thinks that right-wing identity politics is a bigger threat than left-wing identity politics is brazenly ignoring the realities of the US. Or, to quote Hannibal:
That said, I mostly agree with the critiques of each. At least in respect to the stated problems with each. But, again, I think the assumption that right-wing identity politics is majoritarian is laughably wrong. It requires us ignore all those effete, self-hating white folks that drive the progressive movement.That's some serious head-in-the-sand thinking by that writer,Last edited by iam416; March 21, 2019, 12:09 PM.Dan Patrick: What was your reaction to [Urban Meyer being hired]?
Brady Hoke: You know.....not....good.Comment
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