Damnit, it's worse than Beetlejuice, you only have to say his name once for him to show up.Originally Posted by Tsa`ah
Senior Member
Damnit, it's worse than Beetlejuice, you only have to say his name once for him to show up.
I asked for neither your Opinion,
your Acceptance
nor your Permission.
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis." Dante Alighieri 3
"It took 2000 mules to install one Jackass." Diamond and Silk Watch the Movie
Senior Member
LOL
Tough times never last but tough people do. -Robert H Schuller.
For someone who "honestly" doesn't care about rep.. you sure do complain about getting negative rep messages... in much the same manner WB has been doing as of late.
But never could I ever be on the level of idiocy that you bring here... Fort Camp BC boy.Never mind that you're the one that decided to get off the subject because you were getting your chops busted.
Stick to posting jpegs ... when you use actual words you make yourself out to be bigger idiot than you actually are.
PC RETARD HALL OF FAME
Senior Member
I was rather fond of the public option, as I thought it leveled the playing field a bit. Without that, the mandate just ends up lining the insurance companies' pockets with money from new customers and we're supposed to rely upon the companies' good will to lower prices based on their increased revenues from the expanded customer base. Riiiiiiiiigggghht... I'm sure they'll get right on that.
If you had asked me for a citation rather than about correlation and causation, we could have gotten to this point a lot sooner.
This page has government spending, and wikipedia has a list of recessions. I see dips in spending in 1919, 1945, early 1950s, mid 1960s, early 1970s, late 1970s, early 1980s, early 1990s. Going down the list in wikipedia and comparing for recessions: yes, yes, yes, maybe, yes, yes, no, no. Only 2 of the 8 avoided recession for sure, and perhaps not coincidentally they are the smallest % and most gradual cuts.
Hasta pronto, porque la vida no termina aqui...
America, stop pushing. I know what I'm doing.
Senior Member
Under HCR, insurers are to utilize 80-85% of all revenue collected through premiums for actual health care costs. If they don't ... they must rebate.
This is effectively, if enforced, a cap on profit. It remains to be seen how this will be enforced. But I agree ... public option would have been better ... it just wasn't possible.
Senior Member
I think it was. Obama wanted to be a compromiser and the Democratic congressional leadership = not fit to hold LBJ's boots, however.
Last edited by Warriorbird; 12-30-2011 at 09:06 AM.
Senior Member
Under normal circumstances I would agree. These weren't normal circumstances and it would have only been possible if Lieberman were predictable in his vote when the senate needed a super majority to pass anything.
Had the rule been the standard 55 votes ... we would have single payer and wouldn't have had to put up with the GOP slamming the process with amendments.
Labor unions continued to receive the overwhelming majority of waivers from the president’s health care reform law since the Obama administration tightened application rules last summer.
Documents released in a classic Friday afternoon news dump show that labor unions representing 543,812 workers received waivers from President Barack Obama‘s signature legislation since June 17, 2011.
By contrast, private employers with a total of 69,813 employees, many of whom work for small businesses, were granted waivers.
The Department of Health and Human Services revised the rules governing applications for health reform waivers June 17, 2011, amid a steady stream of controversial news reports, including The Daily Caller’s story that nearly 20 percent of last May’s waivers went to businesses in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s district in California.
The labor unions receiving waivers include those that are monitored under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and those that are not. The waivers granted since June 17 are valid until 2013, but recipients must make sure their employees understand the “limits of their coverage,” according to HHS documents.
HHS granted waivers on a year-by-year basis under its initial application process, but waivers granted after June 17 are valid for a maximum of two-and-a-half years
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/06/la...#ixzz1imRfCDdx
PC RETARD HALL OF FAME
Senior Member
Was looking for an appropriate Obamacare-related thread to bump...
This is how Obamacare should be modeled after:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...Tabs%3Darticle
Why Doctors Die Differently
"What's unusual about doctors is not how much treatment they get compared with most Americans, but how little."
Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. It was diagnosed as pancreatic cancer by one of the best surgeons in the country, who had developed a procedure that could triple a patient's five-year-survival odds—from 5% to 15%—albeit with a poor quality of life.
Charlie, 68 years old, was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with his family. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation or surgical treatment. Medicare didn't spend much on him.
It's not something that we like to talk about, but doctors die, too. What's unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared with most Americans, but how little. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care that they could want. But they tend to go serenely and gently.
Doctors don't want to die any more than anyone else does. But they usually have talked about the limits of modern medicine with their families. They want to make sure that, when the time comes, no heroic measures are taken. During their last moments, they know, for instance, that they don't want someone breaking their ribs by performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (which is what happens when CPR is done right).
In a 2003 article, Joseph J. Gallo and others looked at what physicians want when it comes to end-of-life decisions. In a survey of 765 doctors, they found that 64% had created an advanced directive—specifying what steps should and should not be taken to save their lives should they become incapacitated. That compares to only about 20% for the general public. (As one might expect, older doctors are more likely than younger doctors to have made "arrangements," as shown in a study by Paula Lester and others.)
Why such a large gap between the decisions of doctors and patients? The case of CPR is instructive. A study by Susan Diem and others of how CPR is portrayed on TV found that it was successful in 75% of the cases and that 67% of the TV patients went home. In reality, a 2010 study of more than 95,000 cases of CPR found that only 8% of patients survived for more than one month. Of these, only about 3% could lead a mostly normal life.
Unlike previous eras, when doctors simply did what they thought was best, our system is now based on what patients choose. Physicians really try to honor their patients' wishes, but when patients ask "What would you do?," we often avoid answering. We don't want to impose our views on the vulnerable.
The result is that more people receive futile "lifesaving" care, and fewer people die at home than did, say, 60 years ago. Nursing professor Karen Kehl, in an article called "Moving Toward Peace: An Analysis of the Concept of a Good Death," ranked the attributes of a graceful death, among them: being comfortable and in control, having a sense of closure, making the most of relationships and having family involved in care. Hospitals today provide few of these qualities.
Written directives can give patients far more control over how their lives end. But while most of us accept that taxes are inescapable, death is a much harder pill to swallow, which keeps the vast majority of Americans from making proper arrangements.
It doesn't have to be that way. Several years ago, at age 60, my older cousin Torch (born at home by the light of a flashlight, or torch) had a seizure. It turned out to be the result of lung cancer that had gone to his brain. We learned that with aggressive treatment, including three to five hospital visits a week for chemotherapy, he would live perhaps four months.
Torch was no doctor, but he knew that he wanted a life of quality, not just quantity. Ultimately, he decided against any treatment and simply took pills for brain swelling. He moved in with me.
We spent the next eight months having fun together like we hadn't had in decades. We went to Disneyland, his first time, and we hung out at home. Torch was a sports nut, and he was very happy to watch sports and eat my cooking. He had no serious pain, and he remained high-spirited.
One day, he didn't wake up. He spent the next three days in a coma-like sleep and then died. The cost of his medical care for those eight months, for the one drug he was taking, was about $20.
As for me, my doctor has my choices on record. They were easy to make, as they are for most physicians. There will be no heroics, and I will go gentle into that good night. Like my mentor Charlie. Like my cousin Torch. Like so many of my fellow doctors.
—Dr. Murray is retired clinical assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Southern California. Adapted from an article originally published on Zocalo Public Square.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
