Florida State Seminoles

[Saint]

And yes, Personal Responsibility is great. The cops who shoot first should practice that instead of taking the quick and easy way out.

[hedge]

It's not very often that the phrase "tiny sliver of the pie" is associated with BRM...

[sardis]

Even Rat must tip his cap...

[sardis]

A few things:

The professors of Harvard really live in a cocoon.
The fact that people living in a cocoon have such influence on public policy gives pause.
All the professors that are whining can esad...

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102310408

[Bklyn]

Nobody wants their gravy train to end. It's the same with Congressional salary increases being voted while the country was in a recession. It's harder to take something away from someone versus never giving it to them in the first place. That Harvard reaction is consistent with human behavior.

Since I'm neither Harvard faculty nor benefiting from anyone's existence in Harvard employ, fuck 'em.

[eCat]

there really is no getting around that 130m or so people got fucked to make sure 10m give or take get insurance

telling me about the poor guy that didn't have insurance but has it now thanks to subsidies doesn't hold up to well against the thousands who have seen significant rate increases and/or reductions in benefits.

There are hundreds of thousands of Americans that will come to the realization in the next year, if they haven't already - that Obamacare has caused them to take a step back in the level of health care they receive - or at a minimum has put more responsibility on them to manage their health care. I'm sure there are a handful of people that saw their rates go down - the chronically ill, the ones with 25 year olds still in college, etc, but at some point - there going to move out of their "saving" demographic and wind up into the demographics of "you pay for those who can't".

How anyone can justify that as a positive is beyond my ability to comprehend.

[eCat]

and the really sad part of all of this is - I bet the health of Americans declines as a direct result of Obamacare.

[BigRedMan]

"Your perspective is just one tiny sliver of the pie and while you have a point, it's secondary to the bigger point. Maybe you don't care for those protesting, their life choices or whatever, but that doesn't mean that cops around the country are overstepping their bounds and people are dying needlessly.

Police need to figure out a way to take down unarmed suspects without filling them full of lead."

From what I can tell, 47 cops killed by gunfire last year. Just a random pull from a few of these:

"Corporal Jason Harwood was shot and killed while making a traffic stop in the 3200 block of SE Sixth Avenue at approximately 4:45 pm.


Read more: http://www.odmp.org/officer/22176-corpo ... z3NyssAVZK"

"Police Officer Justin Winebrenner was shot and killed while confronting an armed subject while off duty at approximately 2:00 am.

He and several friends were at a pub in the 1800 block of East Market Street when another patron became disorderly and was ejected from the business. The man returned a short time later and brandished a handgun at the staff and other customers. Staff member, who knew Officer Winebrenner was a police officer, alerted him to the situation. He and another off duty officer confronted the man, who then opened fire.

Read more: http://www.odmp.org/officer/22273-polic ... z3NyszvpxR"

"Police Officer Charlie Kondek was shot and killed while responding to a noise complaint call at 199 Grand Boulevard.

Residents of an apartment complex had called police because a man who had been knocking on apartment doors at approximately 2:00 am. When Officer Kondek arrived at the scene he was shot by the subject. The subject, who had recently been released from prison on parole, then drove over Officer Kondek as he fled the scene.

Read more: http://www.odmp.org/officer/22311-polic ... z3Nyt81UjI"



Where is the outrage on this? Where are the protesters?

Oh well it is part of the job. They knew what they signed up for right?

Well when you are criminal and you break the law, I guess they know what they are signing up for also right?

With that being said, do cops make mistakes. Yup. Have there been some cases were unnecessary lethal force was used? Yup. However the small small small percentage of these seem to outshine the ones that right or where they are killed for simply doing their jobs.

Can't have it both ways. Can't say Fuck Da Police then when their community is robbed / shot up , they can't scream where is the police at?

[Owlman]

From the article: This is the truth for that 130 million, not the rhetoric.

"In response, Harvard professors, including mathematicians and microeconomists, have dissected the university's data and question whether its health costs have been growing as fast as the university says. Some created spreadsheets and contended that the university's arguments about the growth of employee health costs were misleading. In recent years, national health spending has been growing at an exceptionally slow rate."

There are companies (including Sears) that are blaming the ACA for things that have nothing to do with the ACA. Harvard was not covered by the ACA. National health care spending has slowed not increase, but it doesn't matter what the facts are, people will believe whatever they want to believe.

[Jungle Rat]

Even Rat must tip his cap...

I'll take your word. I usually just scroll this thread.

[eCat]

From the article: This is the truth for that 130 million, not the rhetoric.

"In response, Harvard professors, including mathematicians and microeconomists, have dissected the university's data and question whether its health costs have been growing as fast as the university says. Some created spreadsheets and contended that the university's arguments about the growth of employee health costs were misleading. In recent years, national health spending has been growing at an exceptionally slow rate."

There are companies (including Sears) that are blaming the ACA for things that have nothing to do with the ACA. Harvard was not covered by the ACA. National health care spending has slowed not increase, but it doesn't matter what the facts are, people will believe whatever they want to believe.

slowed for who? The consumer who has to pay a $5k deductible before insurance kicks in?

I'm sorry Space but at this point there is nothing you can say that will make me believe that the ACA is good for the general population of America. Its designed to help relatively few at the expense of many. Poorly conceived, poorly executed and not in the best interest of Americans as a whole.

At the end of the day, whether companies jacked rates because of ACA or in spite of it - the rates are still jacked because the government attempted to create health care under the premise of saving money for the average American. 130m screwed to assist 10m.

[BigRedMan]

When I worked at the law firm from around August 2011 - August 2012, we had the terrible insurance. I was paying over 500+month with a 5k deduct, had to put money in a HSA so they would match a certain percentage, and didn't really have co-pays but they had " negotiated" costs with health care providers.

So as a new hire, they took requests to speak with the plan person for the next year which was basically a 3rd party they had hired. (bullshit alarm #1)

I made sure I had an appointment to speak with this person. We talk about the plan and I tell him basically in short terms how much it sucks for someone that makes less than 75k a year. A lawyer will have no issues with that insurance but the rest of the people in the firm are taking it hard. He advised that most would try to go to the spouse insurance (bullshit alarm #2). If that were the case, it would all ready be done.

I asked a simple question. How hard was it shopped around? He advised that the insurance company we had was the ONLY one that even submitted anything (bullshit alarm #3). So with a bad economy, a company looking to spend money on insurance and we only had ONE bidder? My ass.

Things I sorta believed from him:

That the average age on our insurance was old. More high risk. Wanted to convince the people that were eligible for retirement / medicaid / whatever to do so. (bullshit alarm #4 no rich ass lawyer is going to do that)

We had two major health issues from people that caused the insurance to pay out - 1 cancer patient and 1 heart attack / surgery person.


Why did I take the job? When I was hired, the insurance was great and then 2 months later (not sure why) they had their enrollment and switched and I got blindsided or I would have never taken the job.

Why did I quit? Insurance was stupid and lawyers are assholes especially the women.

[eCat]

Obamacare was designed such that its most harmful provisions would not be implemented until after the President had been returned to office for a second term and his Democrat accomplices had been reelected to their congressional seats. Fortunately for the nation, the latter part of that strategy was a spectacular failure. Nonetheless, it did provide the public with a temporary reprieve from the health care law’s most painful exactions. That brief respite is now at an end. This year, you will begin to experience the realities of “reform” first hand and you are not going to like how it feels.

In fact, you are probably already feeling the first twinges without recognizing that their source is Obamacare. If you are among the 150 million Americans who get health insurance through their employers, for example, chances are that the coverage your company offered for 2015 has much higher premiums than did last year’s plan. The President and his toad eaters in the legacy media will do their best to convince you that these increases are caused by insurance company avarice, but this is merely another lie they are peddling in the hope that they can save Obama’s “signature domestic achievement.”

The actual cause was the looming employer mandate and other Obamacare regulations that took effect January 1. The mandate and accompanying red tape dramatically increase the cost of employee health insurance for companies with 100 or more full-time-equivalent workers. It requires all such firms to offer “minimum essential” coverage to 70 percent of their full-time employees or pay huge fines. These PPACA-mandated benefits are expensive, and very few small-to-medium sized employers can unilaterally absorb the costs of such “essential” coverage. So you get to share the pain.

But your premiums are just the start.The real pain will come when you need medical services. Your new plan probably has a far higher deductible and co-pay requirement than your old one. Consequently, when you see a doctor or have a test performed, you’ll have to pay the entire cost. This need to pay for such services out-of-pocket despite being insured, according to USA Today, is already causing people to forego care: “A recent Commonwealth Fund survey found that four in 10 working-age adults skipped some kind of care because of the cost, and other surveys have found much the same.”

It gets worse. Even if you’re willing and able to dig into your wallet to pay for an office visit, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can see a doctor in a timely fashion. The primary care physician on whom you and most Americans have long relied for basic medical care is an endangered species. As the AP reports, “A survey this year by The Physicians Foundation found that 81 percent of doctors describe themselves as either over-extended or at full capacity, and 44 percent said they planned to cut back on the number of patients they see, retire… or close their practice to new patients.”

Is it fair to blame Obamacare for the extinction of the PCP? Yes. PPACA creates incentives for doctors to leave the system. It was, for example, used to disguise an outrageous bait-and-switch that duped doctors into accepting millions of new patients now “covered” by Medicaid. However, as the New York Times reported last week, “The Affordable Care Act provided a big increase in Medicaid payments for primary care in 2013 and 2014. But the increase expires on [January 1].” These physicians, according to the Times, “will see their fees for primary care cut by 43 percent, on average.”

And, adding insult to injury, the Obama administration says that these PCPs have “no legal right to challenge the adequacy of payments they received from Medicaid.” They were suckered into accepting Medicaid patients and are now being told they must accept payment rates that don’t even cover their overhead costs. After such a betrayal by the administration that promised to reform the health care system while busily herding millions of patients into a Potemkin coverage program like Medicaid, is it really any wonder nearly half of the nation’s primary care doctors are eyeing the exit?

If you can’t get a timely appointment with a PCP because so many are swamped by new patients “covered” by Medicaid, where do you go for care? The ER? Well, no. That option is now even less palatable than it was in the bad old days before the advent of Obamacare. The New York Post reports, “The Colorado Hospital Association found that the average number of ER visits in states that expanded Medicaid increased by 5.6 percent, when the second quarter of this year was compared with the same period in 2013.” This dwarfed such increases in states that declined to expand Medicaid.

However, as with PCPs, you may soon lose your access to a nearby ER even if you’re willing to endure long wait times and overcrowding. Why? Obamacare is also destroying the community hospital system. Becker’s Hospital Review reported in September that 20 hospitals had gone under during the first eight months of 2014. That’s more than 2 per month, about twice the 2013 closure rate. How is PPACA wreaking such havoc? It is adding expensive regulatory burdens to hospitals while reducing payments for patients covered by government programs like Medicare and, of course, Medicaid.

Welcome to the brave new world of U.S. health care as reformed by the President and congressional Democrats. It is precisely the opposite of what most Americans wanted from reform. Eight months before Obamacare passed, Gallup conducted a survey in which a majority of the public unequivocally stated that controlling costs was its highest priority. Obamacare is actually increasing costs for both patients and providers, while reducing access for the former. And this is just the beginning. The pain will continue to increase until this malignant tumor is cut out of our health care system.

[Saint]

Here's what I'm getting from Obamacare. My company's insurance went up slightly but apparently benefits went down (we use BC/BS). I went to my dr. in early Dec. for a sore throat and cough that I'd had for a couple of weeks. He tested me for strep (throat culture), pneumonia (X rays) and mono (blood test) and were all negative, so he prescribed antibiotics and some great codeine cough syrup. I paid $25 for my co-pay and the meds were $10 each. OK, that's cool. Then I get a bill from the hospital 2 days ago for $158.47 for the tests, which apparently aren't covered now. I had blood work and X-rays there 7 years ago and didn't pay any extra.

Now, if I wanted shitty insurance, I could get it (as well as for my uninsured wife) for $150/mo. through the marketplace. But because the owner of our paper has taken to Tea Partyism the past few years because I guess he's found it easier to blame Obama than all the money he squandered on consultants and gimmicks trying to boost his revenue, he's decided that even though he doesn't have to offer health insurance, that he is because "I don't want to give into the government."

That means I'm stuck with our plan or I could get one via the marketplace without a subsidy and it would be significantly more. I also believe (but I haven't confirmed it) that my wife is not eligible for a subsidy (because the work plan is offered to spouses). So my only option for her, besides paying the fine for not having insurance, is $400/mo (that's in addition to the $220 I'm paying. Since I make a little more than $1,000 take home, you can see that none of these options are really options.

So I don't know if this is what this law intended but the forcing of people to buy insurance, along with having a nitwit boss who would rather take an idiot political stand and force shitty and costly insurance on his employees and the notion that insurance companies are charging more and giving less makes it a mess, IMO. I will give Obama his share of the blame for putting it together but the fact is that he wanted to make a national health plan, which is the ONLY one that would have worked.

I don't want to hear one more person tell me that it would because I know goddamn well that a national plan that works in so many other countries, including 2 that I've been to, would work here. I've had it with people who are against it because of some head-in-the-rectum ideology against govt'-run programs. The reason it was fought against has everything to do with the insurance lobby. I get that. I don't get the average inbred shit for brains around here where I live who just stands against everything he or she thinks isn't approved by Rush Limbaugh or any number of conservative jackasses.

I'm also sick of the myth that the US has the best health care in the world. Even Logan, who is no liberal at all, will tell you that the care he's gotten in the Philippines for pennies on the dollar is as good if not better than what's he received here. If you had to deal with our local hospital, you might think that Mexican hospitals are better.

This whole thing sucks. I remember the lady from the insurance company at our meeting just saying, "Well, we remember those days of 80/20 like our parents had to pay, but of course those days are long gone," with a big shit-eating grin on her face. Why, lady? Why are they gone? Why was health care very much affordable in the '60s and '70s and even '80s and now a hospital bill threatens to crush your finances to the point where you will just not get treatment?

The problem with Obamacare (and he even said it when it was passed) is that it only addresses insurance issues when the real problem is out-of-control cost of health care. That's why we can't have affordable health care like our parents had. It's indicative of the greed that has swept over this nation, beginning in the '80s and exploding in the '90s and now has become an accepted policy, just like that fucking insurance cunt who acted like we were schoolchildren wanting an extra 10 minutes of recess when she was talking about what our insurance wasn't going to cover.

I think Obama had the right idea but in compromising with the swine and jackals in Congress to get this law passed, it has turned into something that isn't helping. Unless I figure something out in the next few weeks, I'm going to have a pretty sticky financial situation on my hands and may have to sell my house before I lose it. It's not just the health insurance situation we're in but it's been a major trigger to speed up what had been a slow financial malaise.

And I'm fucking sick of it. I'm starting to see why those fucking apes over there like to blow shit up.

[sardis]

"Since I make a little more than $1,000 take home, "

That's less than minimum wage, even with taking out taxes. How's your employer get away with that and why don't you look elsewhere?

[eCat]

so you recognize that with government involvement you have shitty health care that leaves you very little options, but you believe a government run national health care plan is the answer Stu? so the answer is ....more government

there may be other countries that have great health care - the question is - are you ready to pay 65% in taxes to cover it along with the other obligations the government already has to get the kind of health care you want? That's not going to happen, and then throw in lobbyist, ear marks, deficit spending, government regulation and red tape - and you're going to end up with a system where you'll be lucky to see some quack in a cubicle at your corner CVS drugstore.

you may think that people that are anti-government have their head up their ass but lets look at a few examples.

the government guarantees student loans - college becomes exorbitant for the masses.
the government guarantees mortgages - housing prices become exorbitant for the masses (until it crashed and took everyone's liquidity with it).
government guarantees medical care for the seniors and health care becomes exorbitant.

all of these programs that the government enacts to help the less fortunate always comes at the expense of the middle class - the people that are working their ass off to stay above water and hold their own. when the government zeros in on a sector of the our life, it creates an artificial market with our tax dollars. The government uses your tax dollars against you in preventing the market from dictating price controls.

That's not tea party idealism. There is no free ride in capitalism.

Ask a veteran how well a national health care plan can be run by the government - and they are supposed to be our nations top priority in regards to health care.

[eCat]

if Obama really gave a shit about how much you pay and what little of health care you are getting as a result of his and congress' lack of foresight, he'd be using his lame duck remaining time to regulate price ceilings, level of coverage and maximum deductibles on policies - but that would cut into insurance company profits and it would be rejected as an attack on the laws of capitalism (while ignoring government mandates and subsidies do as well)

he isn't going to do that because this was written for and by insurance companies. No one in congress or the white house wrote 20,000 pages of Obamacare regs. What the insurance companies wanted was a mandate that everyone has to have insurance and that they'd have a buffer to protect against people just showing up to the doctor every time one of them sneezed and they, the insurance companies would pay for it. Obama wanted to be able to say that every person in America would have insurance (never mind if it actually served a purpose in supporting their everyday health needs). They both got what they wanted.

Obama knows exactly what is happening to the people out there - and it should outrage everyone that he and a democratic congress has put the middle class in a position where they have to make decisions about choosing to spend money tied to large deductibles on health care for themselves and their families.

[Toemeesleather]

Viva la war on poverty.

[hedge]

"When I worked at the law firm from around August 2011 - August 2012, we had the terrible insurance."

Wow, that sentence was Hemingwayesque...

[hedge]

" But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel. What is a bone spur? he asked himself. Un espuela de hueso. We do not have them. Can it be as painful as the spur of a fighting cock in one’s heel?... I wonder how the great DiMaggio would have liked the way I hit him in the brain? It was no great thing, he thought. Any man could do it. But do you think my hands were as great a handicap as the bone spurs? I cannot know. I never had anything wrong with my heel except the time the sting ray stung it when I stepped on him when swimming and paralyzed the lower leg and made the unbearable pain."