SCOTUS UPHOLDS OBAMACARE

[pink]

I think making Bob laugh is at least as important as the impact of our influential debate.

 

i hear ya, you almost feel like you owe him after all these years of reading his post

 

Edited July 1, 2012 by pink

[dougd]

Written by a friend of mine. Since I am a simpleton I will just pass it along.

 

 

Here is my problem with the 'healthcare bill' as it is.

 

Right now (as my recent visit to the hospital's resulting bill indicated) prices at hospitals are completely out of control. The reason for this as far as I can tell are largely because all of the players involved know that money will come to pay for it.

 

Forcing insurance on everyone only makes this problem worse. The only way to drive down the price of a thing is to reduce its demand and to increase its supply.

 

Instead we are subsidizing the American overuse of medical assistance, and as a result we will get more of it as newly insured people try to 'get their money's worth' out of their new insurance.

 

I NEVER visit hospitals, but I am not being told that I have to pay about 8% of my income to medical care or the IRS will start banging on my door.

 

Small employers like my father are holding off hiring new people out of fear of the added expense.

 

Insurance companies are winning. Corporate hospitals are winning. Pharma companies are winning. This is not healthcare reform, this is a VERY large new tax with disproportionate returns. Sure we will hear 'stories' about how it helped some people, but we won't hear the stories of the families who were right on the edge being nudged down into the poverty bracket and forced onto govt assistance because of this.

 

Simple math:

 

4 "I's" + 4 "My's" - 4 "We's" = a net "Selfish"

 

My bottom line:

 

"We" all have not been contributing to the health care system as it is now. Yet, we all use it and need it to work for us at some point. It is widely acknowledged to be unsustainable. A lot of folks pay in, many do not... The one's that pay in end up paying higher premiums etc to cover provider's costs for those who do not pay in. That is a long standing penalty, or tax if you will... With this law, positive change has arrived. Everybody pays in. There is a lot more to this law than just that. The President promised change, and has delivered on health care. It is as he himself admits, only a beginning. Surely we can applaud that, can't we?

 

I've been paying health care premiums for a lot of years and I don't mind helping those who need it but folks that made the decision that health care was just too expensive and spent their money on other things can, now, with subsidies, make cost effective choices through competitive exchanges for their health care needs. Or, they can still choose not to purchase health care insurance and pay a tax which ulitmately helps pay for when they do get sick.

 

Promised change has come. Give the man credit. It took guts and serious courage to fight for, and win this battle.

 

d

 

[denalidave]

70% of people in this country are overweight or obese, hence almost three quarter of population are at high risk of developing cardio-vascular disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes. There is NO HEALTHCARE SYSTEM that can sustain it! The only way the system will work is if there are more healthy people then sick people. If this ratio is reversed you have to switch to pay as you go system. And if people would stop eating shit and start exercising, the cost would go down. I bet more then half of you fuckers here have BMI over 25, or body fat percentage over 25%, which makes you a part of the problem. So if you want real change, start with real good look in the mirror.

 

BANN forks, knives and spoons! Problem Solved

I can still get fat w my chopsticks and you can have them when you pry them (and the bacon) from my cold, dead fingers.

[minx]

70% of people in this country are overweight or obese, hence almost three quarter of population are at high risk of developing cardio-vascular disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes. There is NO HEALTHCARE SYSTEM that can sustain it! The only way the system will work is if there are more healthy people then sick people. If this ratio is reversed you have to switch to pay as you go system. And if people would stop eating shit and start exercising, the cost would go down. I bet more then half of you fuckers here have BMI over 25, or body fat percentage over 25%, which makes you a part of the problem. So if you want real change, start with real good look in the mirror.

 

BANN forks, knives and spoons! Problem Solved

tax them!

 

[AlpineK]

You'll have to ban or tax sticks required for deep fried Mars bars

 

[img:center]https://s3.amazonaws.com/luuux-original-files/bookmarklet_uploaded/deep_fried_mars_bar.jpg[/img]

 

Tax or ban cups for deep fried Coke

[img:center]http://www.supersizedmeals.com/food/images/articles/20061020-Deep_Fried_Coke_2.JPG[/img]

 

I'm not sure what to ban or tax for folks eating deep fried Oreos

 

[img:center]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_wosEZOJ58DM/SfUjGn5Yj_I/AAAAAAAAAlQ/l21zPfF0ARw/s400/Deep+Fried+Oreo.2.jpg[/img]

 

Then the nation needs to talk about taxing wafer thin mints

 

[video:youtube]

 

[rob]

FASCISM!!!

[tvashtarkatena]

The court rejected the 'broccoli' argument on several grounds. First, health care is not like the purchase of other commercial products, even 'healthy' products like broccoli. Everyone necessarily will participate in the health care market at one time or another, unlike the broccoli market. The 'potential' for participating the the broccoli market, the court wrote, does not constitute participation. Since everyone participates in the health care market, Congress's interstate commerce argument for citing the Commerce Clause as the source of their regulatory power might fly (it did not in this case for other reasons), unlike a mandate to, say, purchase broccoli to promote the General Welfare, presumably, improve the health of the People.

 

Second, a broccoli purchase mandate could not guarantee said broccoli would be prepared in a healthy fashion or not simply thrown out by those who don't like broccoli. The end result (more people eating more broccoli) is too far removed from the hypothetical regulation (buy broccoli or pay a penalty). Based on precedence, the Court wrote that a broccoli or similar mandate would be unconstitutional.

 

Finally, the Constitution's stated purpose, per the Preamble; to "and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity", might prevent the Government from attempting to regulate such detailed aspects of our personal lives. Then again, we still have marijuana prohibition.

 

It's interesting that the primary emotional driver of the Libertarian movement is the fiction that others are mooching off 'my money'. The Government explicitly has the power to promote the General Welfare through Taxation: to subsidize the welfare of others through wealth redistribution. IE, in this Democracy, everything you gross is not yours. Civilization costs money, and those who can, pay for it. It's been this since the day the Constitution was ratified.

 

Rather, my perception of Libertarians is that they are folks who tend to have projection issues. While their primary concern is others, typically straw men, and usually little brown and often female straw men, mooching off them, their primary political objective is to enjoy all the benefits of society: the roads, the grid, the internet, the education system, defense, without which their success would be impossible, for free. Their primary efforts are to increase their ability to mooch off the rest of us, and at the expense of those less fortunate, in other words.

 

Regarding the statement that 'people who purchase health care will use more' - well, I'm still chuckling over that one. Any low income folks who purchase their own health care will certainly opt for the much cheaper catastrophic care packages with high (typically $5000) deductibles. They're not going to be running to the doc anymore than when they were not insured given that they must pay for everything up to that 5 grand limit out of pocket. These sad stories always come with heart rending tales of somebody's poor old dad who is afraid to hire new employees for his soda shop. These pieces are, in fact, not written by 'my friend', but by campaigns to disseminate under the guise of personal anecdote. The arguments put forth are 100% straw man and, in most case, just plain stupid. Fuck you to anyone who parrots this crap. You make the world a dumber, less honest place.

 

Obamacare seeks to solve the problem of reducing an overly large, unnacceptable (at least to anyone with a shred of conscience) number of uninsured people. It also seeks to reduce medical care costs, but will probably not be as successful at this, because it does not address the problem's 800 pound gorilla: that American overhead costs are, on average, 12% higher than other civilized countries.

 

The obvious solution to making health care available to all Americans AND reduce health care costs is to make Medicare/caid available to all Americans. Single payer. The experiment has been done numerous times successfully both here (add VA benefits to the our list of successful single payer programs) and abroad, but the Right actively opposes such a real, long term solution too much to make it politically feasible right now. We'll eventually have to do it. It's only a matter of time.

Edited July 1, 2012 by tvashtarkatena

[tvashtarkatena]

In general, I support the Court's current trend towards reducing Federal power. The Government has not served us well these past 12 years. It has squandered our wealth on wealth concentrating tax cuts rather than fairness of opportunity, big bank giveaways, and failed foreign adventures. It continues its 40th year of the most expensive and human rights eroding policy disaster in history, the War on Drugs, relatively unabated. Our incarceration rate, world's highest, is now 7 times per capita that of China. The Government is now so far removed from addressing the needs of the middle class that, it's debates so ridiculously infused with religiously based idiocy, it this point, we'd be a healthier nation of power continued to shift to lower level, more responsive seats of government and the People.

[burchey]

You remind me of my girlfriend.

 

No offense intended to Crazy Polish Bob, but your girlfriend must be pretty ugly.

 

You tell me

 

[Off_White]

Nice twist on the tired "your mom" schtick, but I'm afraid my daughter has better sense than your actual (?) girlfriend, whom you seem happy to diss on the internet. That girl should DTMFA. I mean seriously, any way one interprets your statement, you're a tool:

 

A: you actually have a girlfriend that you like to talk shit about with "the guys." Why would you be with someone you felt that way about, and why would she stick with such a cad?

 

B: you were just being rhetorical, since you don't really have a girlfriend, but you think calling GGK a girl is an insult. Do you have some kind of negative narrative built up about what a girlfriend is and how women think? In that case you're merely a clueless dolt.

 

Hey, people say stupid shit on the internet all the time, but you might consider the notion that's what you actually did when you thought you were being clever.

[burchey]

Nice twist on the tired "your mom" schtick, but I'm afraid my daughter has better sense than your actual (?) girlfriend, whom you seem happy to diss on the internet. That girl should DTMFA. I mean seriously, any way one interprets your statement, you're a tool:

 

I'm sure your daughter has sense. If you're lucky, maybe when she gets a little older, she'll use it to teach her dad how to read something and then respond in a way that actually has anything to do with anything. No place in my post did I refer to the physical appearance of Polish Bob. I did refer to his habit of getting "fired up about a perceived opinion instead of focusing on the simple question" something my wonderful girlfriend and a great number of women I deal with on a daily basis tend to do. This is a behavior I've found pretty common among my mostly female coworkers, and a lot of my friends who label themselves "extremely liberal". Based on his (and now your) response to clear and direct posts, along with what we can only assume is your male gender, I think we can correctly deduce who you most likely voted for in the 2008 presidential election. In addition, when it comes to unrelated "jokes" about someone's appearance: men who bear a resemblance to Bruce Vilanch, and also live in glass houses, should not throw stones.

 

A: you actually have a girlfriend that you like to talk shit about with "the guys." Why would you be with someone you felt that way about, and why would she stick with such a cad?

 

If you have to ask this question, I'll assume you're probably divorced. If not, I'll wager that you think your lady reads this forum, and will be SO PROUD of her man for being the Champion of Women's Rights here on CC. To paraphrase the ever-eloquent Lil' Kim: Y'dumb.

 

B: you were just being rhetorical, since you don't really have a girlfriend, but you think calling GGK a girl is an insult. Do you have some kind of negative narrative built up about what a girlfriend is and how women think? In that case you're merely a clueless dolt.

I don't believe calling Polish Bob a woman is an insult, but I had a pretty good feeling that if I compared a behavior of his to a typical female one, I'd get the desired result. It would appear I've accidentally caught the wrong squirrel.

 

 

Hey, people say stupid shit on the internet all the time

I know, right? >>>>>>>>

No offense intended to Crazy Polish Bob, but your girlfriend must be pretty ugly.

[selkirk]

The court rejected the 'broccoli' argument on several grounds. First, health care is not like the purchase of other commercial products, even 'healthy' products like broccoli. Everyone necessarily will participate in the health care market at one time or another, unlike the broccoli market. The 'potential' for participating the the broccoli market, the court wrote, does not constitute participation. Since everyone participates in the health care market, Congress's interstate commerce argument for citing the Commerce Clause as the source of their regulatory power might fly (it did not in this case for other reasons), unlike a mandate to, say, purchase broccoli to promote the General Welfare, presumably, improve the health of the People.

 

Second, a broccoli purchase mandate could not guarantee said broccoli would be prepared in a healthy fashion or not simply thrown out by those who don't like broccoli. The end result (more people eating more broccoli) is too far removed from the hypothetical regulation (buy broccoli or pay a penalty). Based on precedence, the Court wrote that a broccoli or similar mandate would be unconstitutional.

 

Finally, the Constitution's stated purpose, per the Preamble; to "and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity", might prevent the Government from attempting to regulate such detailed aspects of our personal lives. Then again, we still have marijuana prohibition.

 

It's interesting that the primary emotional driver of the Libertarian movement is the fiction that others are mooching off 'my money'. The Government explicitly has the power to promote the General Welfare through Taxation: to subsidize the welfare of others through wealth redistribution. IE, in this Democracy, everything you gross is not yours. Civilization costs money, and those who can, pay for it. It's been this since the day the Constitution was ratified.

 

Rather, my perception of Libertarians is that they are folks who tend to have projection issues. While their primary concern is others, typically straw men, and usually little brown and often female straw men, mooching off them, their primary political objective is to enjoy all the benefits of society: the roads, the grid, the internet, the education system, defense, without which their success would be impossible, for free. Their primary efforts are to increase their ability to mooch off the rest of us, and at the expense of those less fortunate, in other words.

 

Regarding the statement that 'people who purchase health care will use more' - well, I'm still chuckling over that one. Any low income folks who purchase their own health care will certainly opt for the much cheaper catastrophic care packages with high (typically $5000) deductibles. They're not going to be running to the doc anymore than when they were not insured given that they must pay for everything up to that 5 grand limit out of pocket. These sad stories always come with heart rending tales of somebody's poor old dad who is afraid to hire new employees for his soda shop. These pieces are, in fact, not written by 'my friend', but by campaigns to disseminate under the guise of personal anecdote. The arguments put forth are 100% straw man and, in most case, just plain stupid. Fuck you to anyone who parrots this crap. You make the world a dumber, less honest place.

 

Obamacare seeks to solve the problem of reducing an overly large, unnacceptable (at least to anyone with a shred of conscience) number of uninsured people. It also seeks to reduce medical care costs, but will probably not be as successful at this, because it does not address the problem's 800 pound gorilla: that American overhead costs are, on average, 12% higher than other civilized countries.

 

The obvious solution to making health care available to all Americans AND reduce health care costs is to make Medicare/caid available to all Americans. Single payer. The experiment has been done numerous times successfully both here (add VA benefits to the our list of successful single payer programs) and abroad, but the Right actively opposes such a real, long term solution too much to make it politically feasible right now. We'll eventually have to do it. It's only a matter of time.

 

[selkirk]

You remind me of my girlfriend.

 

No offense intended to Crazy Polish Bob, but your girlfriend must be pretty ugly.

 

You tell me

 

 

Dude, she has a beard!

[selkirk]

What people seem not to understand, is that by having a disproportionate percentage of the population uninsured, not only are "we" (the insured population) paying for the inevitable costs of caring for the uninsured, but are paying much more when they show up at the ER with advanced diseases that could have been treated cheaper and yielded better outcomes had they had access to basic medical services to begin with. That's a big part of why the US pays more as percent GDP than any other country for poorer results.

 

I'd like to see how the righties come up with the figures which they're trying to terrorize the Tea-tards with now which describes this a giant huge new tax burden on ordinary 'Muricans. I call BS. It's not like they aren't pathological liars already.

 

 

Exactly. I can think of several studies i've read looking at elderly care and medicares costs per person that have all shown that it's much less expensive to pay up front with prevention, monitoring, and support than to pay on the back end for acute cases.

 

Even going locally I had a chance to talk to some folks who worked at Harborview and were well versed in the topic and some local work had shown the cost in ER visits for local homeless folks per year was more than 2x what the cost would be to house them.

 

Right now these same folks are all getting healthcare, it's just a shell game of when, where and who picks up the tab.

 

I'm not trying to pick on you in particular - but I'll respond to your post since you seem like a smart, reasonable guy and you seem to be sympathetic to the arguments put forward by everyone else who supports the mandate.

 

Which studies are you referring to? Systematic reviews of the costs and benefits of "prevention" do not support any such generalization.

"Our findings suggest that the broad generalizations made by many presidential candidates can be misleading. These statements convey the message that substantial resources can be saved through prevention. Although some preventive measures do save money, the vast majority reviewed in the health economics literature do not."

 

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0708558

 

The notion that the uninsured are the primary driver of cost shifting that other payers have to bear is also false. That distinction belongs to medicare and medicaid, both of which systematically pay less than it costs to provide care for those covered by the programs, and the costs of the shortfall are passed onto private payers. Cost shifting from Medicare and Medicaid adds roughly 15% to private payer premiums(1). The uninsured add less than two percent(2).

(1)http://publications.milliman.com/research/health-rr/pdfs/hospital-physician-cost-shift-RR12-01-08.pdf

(2)http://www.kff.org/uninsured/upload/7809.pdf

 

Finally - if you support mandating the purchase of health insurance on the grounds that those who do not do so are imposing costs on everyone else, how would you feel about the government mandating that everyone in the country maintain a healthy body weight and fining those who refuse to comply with the mandate on the basis that they are imposing costs on everyone else? It's not clear to me how a logically consistent person could support the former and not the latter.

 

New Yorker article on Treatment approach

 

Atlantic Article on more efficient medicare spending.

[rob]

I will NOT let you guys drag this down into a rational, mature discussion of the issues.

 

[kevbone]

I will NOT let you guys drag this down into a rational, mature discussion of the issues.

 

 

[olyclimber]

I will NOT let you guys drag this down into a rational, mature discussion of the issues.

 

 

thats a straw man bro. and ad hominem.

[burchey]

[rob]

I haven't really been all that impressed with your posts, Olyclimber. You must live in Olympia, right?

[burchey]

[olyclimber]

MOUNT OLYMPUS MY MINION!!!!!

 

[kevbone]

Best thread ever?

[rob]

more like MONS PUBIS olyclimber from olympia

 

lololol

[olyclimber]

Hey, thinking about having an Olympia meetup/pubcrawl...who is down?

[olyclimber]

more like MONS PUBIS olyclimber from olympia

 

lololol

 

[video:youtube]dr1uKfb3t3E