JosephH

I peg healthcare as a prerequisite for a qualified workforce. Folks can't concentrate on acquiring an education and skills if their families are constantly battling healthcare issues and costs.

Now I've made it repeatedly clear I have no doubt you work for an employer with superb coverage, care to say who? Microsoft? Safeco? I'm guessing not Boeing or WaMu. But again, what are the odds of you maintaining that coverage switching from your current employer? And, again, how much do you suppose that coverage actually costs (in total) and how many people or even employers do you suppose can afford coverage like that? Is your point that everyone should get the same coverage as a well-educated, white male? Or are you saying we should compete for healthcare and only high achievers should be so rewarded? Maybe all our infrastructure should be the same way? You know only well-educated, highly competitive individuals should get good roads, clean water, and sewage systems. As a businessman I can assure you universal healthcare is a foundational competitive advantage for our country - without it we will continue to decline.

And never in the history of our nation has this been so succinctly illustrated as under the administration of George W. Bush at the helm of all three branches of government under Republican control.

And how much do you suppose that coverage actually costs (in total). The question was if you, your wife, or child ended up with cancer and for some reason had to switch employers what do you suppose would be the result? And how many people do you suppose can afford coverage like that? Yep, that's how the country was built. My views as both a self-employed person and as an employer are no different than most all employers grappling with the issue of the high cost of healthcare and the rapidly declining return on the dollars spent. Small business is being jack-hammered by healthcare costs. Again, just what percentage of our citizens have coverage like yours - and even yours is incredibly fragile if anything catastrophic occured and you had to change jobs. P.S. A survey just released said 51% of Americans had deferred filling a perscription or seeking medical help due to cost considerations - sounds like a great and highly competitive nation, doesn't it - a real leader.

I send my kid to private school and happily pay for public education as well - there is absolutely no difference.

And you arrive at this prodigous conclusion how?

Again, if you or a member of your family had cancer, a serious illness, or suffered some major accident and had to switch jobs for any reason COBRA would do you no good whatsoever and the only coverage you could get would be incredibly expensive and would not cover your pre-existing conditions - you'd be screwed. Think differently and you're just kidding yourself. If you develop cancer in a smaller company that self-insures you can bet your ass in most cases they'll do everything humanly possible to get rid of you. As for how the healthcare system fails me - well, I'm self-employed so it fails me instantly by the fact I and my family pay exorbitant rates for coverage. It fails me because I know how badly our system burdens employers and makes us less competitive as a nation - and that effects my business. It fails me because paying for the medical costs of un- and under-insured Americans costs inordinately more than it should and comes out of my pocket. It fail me, you, and all of us by making us incredibly less competitive and as an obstacle to the widespread adoption of preventative medicine.

Ericb, again, how would you fair if you developed cancer, and then got laid off or your company went under? Think you'd do well? As for entitlement, that's a matter of opinion. If you are saying that everyone should compete for the right to reasonable healthcare then I'd say absolutely not. For our country to compete we need a highly skilled and educated workforce which by definition means a healthy populace - the two are inseperable. Competing internally for basic necessities simply creates a nation corporations will flee when burdened with the associated costs.

There absolutely is no litigation or malpractice crisis - that is classic Republican fear-mongering at its best. Malpractice litigation is still the only really effective independent oversight of the medical profession that exists today. And kkk is right, by and large doctors are no longer rich. That's because the same folks who raped pension funds in the 80s and who specialize in raiding piles of loose cash identified doctor salaries as one of those loose piles in the late 80's and removed about 150-250k from each doctor over the course of the 90's. That's part of what provider corporations and HMO's was all about. As for the let's blow off insurance companies and pool revolution, it cannot and will not happen as a grassroots level because by definition it's about a single massive pool, not a hundred thousand small ones. A single risk pool of all citizens along with a single transaction system is the only way to achieve real, effective reform.

JayB, Nearly all the proposed 'reform' plans simply add yet another layer on top of the ones we already have. Until we are in a single pool, using a single transaction system, we will never escape the overhead inherent in our current system. And what is to be gained fracturing the pool even by states? Hell, you see states now attempting to pool together to get some leverage. There is nothing gained by us all not being in a single risk pool and transaction system - nothing. There are simply too many parasites attempting to make a profit on the system we have today. Those parasites drain resources that could easily fund technical advances and preventative medicine. In fact, the current system will never support even the premise of preventative medicine.

That's a joke no doubt - the families of those same individuals do not have adequate, secure health insurance coverage either. Hell, who does have decent coverage that wouldn't be canned in a heartbeat at a job change after a serious illness, accident, or cancer? You? Are you sure?

JayB - dollar for dollar our healthcare system is a complete and dismal failure. It is utterly sinking under the weight of everyone that wants a piece of the pie. Employers are bailing on it faster than rats off a sinking ship, insurers are dumping any and everyone with any risk of serious illness, growing tens of millions are without any coverage. Which part of the system is it that works - your policy? Congress'? Corporate executives? Hopefully you won't get cancer, get laid off, and try to get coverage at a new job - or just get a new job for that matter. This isn't manufacturing, it isn't the service sector, it isn't media (though I don't hear you touting what a glowing achievement of capitalism that that consolidation is). It's a basic requirement of every citizen - but instantanced as a shrinking risk pool so as to only cover healthy, young adults and even that at exorbitant rates. Anyone posing a risk is summarily dumped - it is unsustanable, untenable, and unconscionable. It is very much a part of why we are loosing ground in the world economy.

Our defense procurement system is not a service system, it is a corporate and state welfare system first and foremost and a defense procurement system second. The problems are wholly related to the closed-loop nature of the purpose of defense and states desires to share in the largess. The U.S. desperately needs a single, universal health insurance system. We can retain various healthcare service providers, but again, we need a single healthcare insurance system where every citzen is covered and all coverage is uniform. Our current healthcare system is killing both people and their employers unnecessarily. Ah, clearly a happy Microsoft customer. Outside of operating systems, we don't sell to a uniform base of customers who would benefit greatly from the sort of large-scale aggregation desperately needed in healthcare. There is no, repeat, no advantage for all citizens to not be in a single health insurance pool.

Once again, "Corporations without proper government oversight are indistinguishable from organized crime."

jjd, just focusing on healthcare alone we now have one the most expensive and least effective healthcare systems among industrialized nations. It is a serious boat anchor on our economy and the well-being of families. I'm a systems architect and I can tell you for a fact that the IT overhead alone in our system is killing us. That we spend billions annually attempting to interface differing systems at all layers of the healthcare infrastructure - at doctors, pharmacies, hospitals, insurers, states, and the federal government. Every doctor, pharmacy, hospital, insurer, state, and federal agency is using different software that is all constantly churning within itself and at the interfaces with all the other systems. What is required is ONE system of standardized interfaces across all providers, pharmacys, insurers, states, and federal government. The current administrative overhead for private insurers alone is about $100 billion per year and that doesn't count the costs to everyone doing business with them. They whole system likely cost closer to .5 trillion dollars per year. We do not get value for the money spent, period. What bedevils our healthcare system isn't the government - it's the lack of a single-provider system that cuts out all the parasites that provide zero value yet are endemic in our current system. Our healthcare system is a complete failure at the moment based on the dollars spent relative to the services it provides.

So Seahawks, you want to take it sector by sector and show how the collusion between corporations and this adminstration has been anything but a sale of government - to be honest an old school, Eisenhower Republican would consider it treason.

Ever hear of SOX????? Actually, yes - but it's more about governance oversight and regulatory compliance reporting - it is about corporations adhering to the law, not about their efforts to change it. It doesn't address at all the efforts of corporations to get the previous Congress to gut state oversight of whole industries. Or any number of successful campaigns to eliminate or gut consumer and environmental protection laws they find inconvenient. Or the wholesale dismantling or shutdown of our government - agency by agency - by corporate lobbyists appointed as agency heads by a corrupt administration. All in all, SOX is about governance, structure, and reporting within the law - not the wholesale manipulation of law and it's enforcement.

Adam Smith vs. Government-Enabled Theft ======================================= Healthcare - many uninsured, poor coverage, high premiums, litany of expensive middlemen, widespread exclusions of pre-existing conditions, loss of coverage due to major illnesses, Marketing is the highest cost component of pharmecuticals, even non-healthcare corporations are being driven offshore by healthcare costs. Insurance - when a claim is submitted for almost any form of insurance a growning standard practice is now to deny it which drops about 5-20% of claims; then send out a very lowball settlement check resolving another 20-30% of claims who protest; then battling anyone that hasn't gone away stretching out the process and whacking another 20-30%, and only really settling legitimately with the remaining determined policy holders. Education - vast student loan conspiracy rapes the average student and family - is it good business or treason? 50+% of professional graduates are foreigners because we refuse to emphasize educating Americans. Corporations pay next to nothing into state education systems. Education and skills are the only competitive edge the U.S. has and we aren't lagging, we're crashing. The Bush administration has done everything in it's power to remove insurance regulation from states, essentially destroying existing industry oversight or policing. Banking - the Bush administration has engineered the removal of state oversight and regulation of broad swaths of the banking and finance industry essentially destroying existing industry oversight or policing. Immigration - corporations want stunning levels of H-1B visas to import foreign skilled workers rather than invest in Americans the skills they need to do the work. An endless list of skilled and professional "shortages" such as for Nurses are claimed to exist, yet Nursing education has not ramped up at all to educate Americans, all while we invest next to nothing in ourselves. Pensions - For the past quarter decade the American pension and retirement system has been systematically pillaged, looted, and destroyed by financial pirates who, having looted pretty much all the private pension funds, now desperately want to do the same to social security - the last gleaming treasure trove, it maddens them it is still out of reach after years of Bush administration promises it would soon be theirs. Oh, yeah - this version of free-market capitalism is just what Adam Smith had in mind. Or, to quote the summary statement of a friend's PhD dissertation in Accounting - "Corporations without proper government oversight are indistinguishable from organized crime."

As said above, a break that involves tendon attachement points or joints is an order of magnitude more serious than one that is essentially a "chip". The fact you're in a hard cast versus a soft one or no cast says quite a bit by itself. The latter may well be a 6-8 week job, but the form is definitely more of a 4 month one. I've done a minor heel break and ankle sprain of the 6-8 week variety, but there was absolutely no complcations of any kind. Find out what the real story is and post back up with the details of what else is or is not involved in the break.

Got in the water at Doug's Beach in the Gorge on Sat. and got mildly brutalized in a big, very gusty day. I didn't get out at all last year on account of climbing so had to pay a few dues getting my water chops back.

MisterE, that sounds great - you must be getting in good shape pulling down at that altitude...

It's going to be raging in the Gorge - going windsurfing...

Any one planning on climbing Hood should be tracking these two links in addition to the local forecast. The PacSat loop shows weather systems out to Japan and the jet stream snap gives you an idea of where they might land: Pacific Satellite Loop Jet Stream

Oh sorry, I thought you were talking about the Bushco conspirators in the Justice Department. Then again, what the hell, they're only burning the Constitution. Just which American Terrorists are doing the most damage - the ones inside the administration with the power to deconstruct our national government, or the ones on the outside with little means and a decidedly local scope?

Facing the rock you can climb to the right of the 'no climbing sign'. Feel free to PM Kevin or I for details.