Primary June 6th........
 

How did you ever get through law school with such poor reading comprehension. I never said this, and I never said anything remotely close to this.

How can you know anything about what I read, if you can't understand anything you read.

Primary June 6th........
 

Above is what you said I said. And this is the actual post that I made that led to this conversation.

"I have lived in four countries that had socialized medicine. And in every single country it sucked. I prefer our health system any day.

However, the private market does not provide health care for everyone so the government has to step in. I believe that the government should step in to make sure everyone has healthcare, but this step should involve as little government involvement as possible."


Now upon review do you think how you and SAM characterized my comments had any relationship to reality?

Primary June 6th........
 

Did you find that preferable to living in a country where the government insured you?

Did you actually ever need medical help during that time?

(College doesn't count, by the way, if you could just walk into the campus med. center.)

Primary June 6th........
 

Infinetely. In most of the countries that had socialized medicine I eventually went to private doctors because the public hospitals were so dirty and poorly run.

Yes. And it cost about the same as private medicine in both Japan and England.

In college, because my income was so low, I was able to go to the San Diego County hospital and get free care. The free care provided at the San Diego County hospital (which is free) was infinitely better than the care I got in both England and Japan.

Primary June 6th........
 

Well, when you put it like that... blush...

But it's pretty hard to understand your point. "We need government, just as little as possible" is meaningless. The places where you try to give it meaning amount to saying "government is bad, and we should have less of it." Do you believe, then, that government has done enough to make sure that everyone has adequate healthcare? Do the government efforts to provide such healthcare work better when more private enterprise is involved? Somehow, I doubt that -- gov't-private partnerships can bring out the worst of both sectors, rather than the best. (i.e, combining the efficiency of a government bureaucracy with the caring, non-profit-driven motivation of an HCA corp.)

Primary June 6th........
 

No, YOU read MY post, Mister!!

My post was divided into my actual response, and an alternative response, and I expressly said that the passage you quote was the alternative -- what I would say "if I posted like Hank."

So you're right, it has very little connection to reality, but I telegraphed that up front!

SO THERE! BURN! I AM RUBBER YOU ARE GLUE.

S_A_M :butt:

Primary June 6th........
 

No. I think everyone in the US should have health insurance.

They can. But if done right they don't. The later part of my original comment said that we need to figure out a way so everyone in the US gets somekind of medical insurance but find a way to have as little government involvement as possible. Personally I think that we should require employers to provide health insurance. Right now I employ four people and they all get health insurance.

I also proposed earlier that we should require health insurance if you want a drivers license. No health insurance, no license. If you can show that you are poor you get free health insurance, but if you have the money, no insurance, no license. If you are middle class, and don't drive, you get covered by the government. That encourages people not to drive and saves reduces our dependency on oil. If you make over seventy thousand a year, you have to pay for your own medical insurance even if you don't have a license.

The problem with the Democrats is that when they come up with a solution it always involves too much government involvement. When the government completely controls a program it sucks.

Primary June 6th........
 

The discussion wasn't about socialized medicine. It was about Medicare. The discussion cannot contune unless you understand, at a very basic level, how Medicare works. Since I do not have the time or inclination to discuss at length the implementation in 1965 of parts A (hospital charges) and B (inpatient and outpatient physician charges) with the inclusion of co-insurance and fiscal intermediaries, as well as the subsequent switchover to the Prospective Payment System in 1982, so you're up to speed on how the Medicare Modernization Act's drug benefit program in Part D differs GREATLY with the rest of the system, I have to bow out of the discussion.

I will say, though that we live in a country where the majority of healthcare costs are picked up by the Federal Government. We also live in a country where the population is aging at a rapid, rapid rate and the Medicare trust fund is going to take a major strain. It's important that you understand that not a single serious proposal for universal coverage that I've ever heard, including the Clinton plan, was ever modelled after socialized medicine as seen in any other country in the world.

Primary June 6th........
 

No it wasn't. Medicare was a side subject. It was a discussion about the private and public involvement in Medicine. After I made the statement that I quoted to Sidd, you told me to review Medicare.

The main point of that statement was that we should reduce government involvement as much as possible.


[/QUOTE] The discussion cannot contune unless you understand, at a very basic level, how Medicare works. Since I do not have the time or inclination to discuss at length the implementation in 1965 of parts A (hospital charges) and B (inpatient and outpatient physician charges) with the inclusion of co-insurance and fiscal intermediaries, as well as the subsequent switchover to the Prospective Payment System in 1982, so you're up to speed on how the Medicare Modernization Act's drug benefit program in Part D differs GREATLY with the rest of the system, I have to bow out of the discussion.
[/QUOTE]

That is more than I want to know, or think I will ever need to know about medicare.

No but it still had too much government involvement. The Clinton health plan was written by people that had no concept of how the market helps improve service and reduces costs. One example of how the plan would screw up markets, was the plan tried to put limits on drug company profits. The only way that companys will risk spending vast sums of dollars on drug research is if they know that they will get big profits. If there isn't a big reward there will be no risk. When she was faced with this question her response was "we will have to incentivize the drug companys another way". Of course she never explained what that other way was.

Primary June 6th........
 

And Medicare Part D was written by people who have no comprehension of how private industry's primary goal of maximizing profits is incompatible with it providing maximum services for minimal cost when the costs are being borne by the government.

Actually, that's not true. I think that they know exactly how much is true, and intended exactly what happened.

You guys fucked this one up, plain and simple. It's a massive teat to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries disguised as a social program. Way to go.

Primary June 6th........
 

If that's so, what does it say for the second?

Primary June 6th........
 

What makes you think I had anything to do with this program? I have never even defended it.

Primary June 6th........
 

If you take a pistol and shoot at me, shame on you. If I have a pistol, and don't use it to defend myself, shame on me.

If I am attacked I always respond in kind. Do you have a problem with that?

The President's prescient SoTU
 

Today's warning level: "Furries."

http://jesseberney.com/images/200602...ridwarning.jpg

The Long War
 

It's seemed intuitively true for some time now, but this is the first time I recall seeing this thinking institutionalized.

• The Pentagon, readying for what it calls a "long war," yesterday laid out a new 20-year defense strategy that envisions U.S. troops deployed, often clandestinely, in dozens of countries at once to fight terrorism and other nontraditional threats.
  
  Major initiatives include a 15 percent boost in the number of elite U.S. troops known as Special Operations Forces, a near-doubling of the capacity of unmanned aerial drones to gather intelligence, a $1.5 billion investment to counter a biological attack, and the creation of special teams to find, track and defuse nuclear bombs and other catastrophic weapons.
  
  China is singled out as having "the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States," and the strategy in response calls for accelerating the fielding of a new Air Force long-range strike force, as well as for building undersea warfare capabilities.
  
  The latest top-level reassessment of strategy, or Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), is the first to fully take stock of the starkly expanded missions of the U.S. military -- both in fighting wars abroad and defending the homeland -- since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
  
  The review, the third since Congress required the exercise in the 1990s, has been widely anticipated because Donald H. Rumsfeld is the first defense secretary to conduct one with the benefit of four years' experience in office. Rumsfeld issued the previous QDR in a hastily redrafted form days after the 2001 strikes.
  
  The new strategy, summarized in a 92-page report, is a road map for allocating defense resources. It draws heavily on the lessons learned by the U.S. military since 2001 in Iraq, Afghanistan and counterterrorism operations. The strategy significantly refines the formula -- known as the "force planning construct" -- for the types of major contingencies the U.S. military must be ready to handle.