More Obamacare fuckups

[Atlanteax]

For the longest time I hated the concept of paying tolls to drive down a specific stretch of road.

Nowadays I'm wondering if we would indeed be better off with more freeways under a toll system ... and cities (including your suburban 'cities') being 100% fiscally responsible for their own roads.
If the local politicians cannot handle ensuring the roads are paved and of good quality, they get replaced in the next election. So there is actually more of an onus to ensure no stretch of countless potholes.

In the meantime, since road commissions / contractors / road-workers are essentially all public employees, proper road maintenance just does not happen.

[Atlanteax]

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We're at #1 in American history for all three.Police (and domestic security in general), military (and defense in general), utilities, roads.

Sorry, I don't think any of these are as successful as they would be if they were privatized, with the possible exception of the military.

Military is not well-organized. The logistic nightmares of the campaigns in the Middle East points to this. The onus is inexplicably on the local/state level as opposed to everything being organized and directed at the federal level. Outrageously haphazard to the extent of the delay in delivery of equipment/etc (much less the 'correct' supplies) and the frequency of equipment being left behind / abandoned at deployment end.

Editted to add: Sad how private security organizations operate on a superior level at times.

[cwolff]

Military is not well-organized. The logistic nightmares of the campaigns in the Middle East points to this. The onus is inexplicably on the local/state level as opposed to everything being organized and directed at the federal level. Outrageously haphazard to the extent of the delay in delivery of equipment/etc (much less the 'correct' supplies) and the frequency of equipment being left behind / abandoned at deployment end.

Editted to add: Sad how private security organizations operate on a superior level at times.

Our military is incredibly well organized. You can point to flaws for sure but you have no idea of the project management it takes to launch the U.S. military at a country. The contractors don't have the same level of accountability and they benefit from all the groundwork laid down by the U.S. military. I bet they used military planes and housing too.

"Clearly, logistics is the hard part of fighting a war."
- Lt. Gen. E. T. Cook, USMC, November 1990

[waywardgs]

You know, this is a really insensitive comparison to make when you know ex-military people read this board. Or I guess you just don't care about our troops like waywardgs? Pretty sad. Pretty sad.

Slander!

[Latrinsorm]

Military is not well-organized. The logistic nightmares of the campaigns in the Middle East points to this. The onus is inexplicably on the local/state level as opposed to everything being organized and directed at the federal level. Outrageously haphazard to the extent of the delay in delivery of equipment/etc (much less the 'correct' supplies) and the frequency of equipment being left behind / abandoned at deployment end.

Editted to add: Sad how private security organizations operate on a superior level at times.

It's pretty easy to set a dinner date for 2 people, Ker_Thwap's unnerving backwoods dates notwithstanding. It's much harder to set one for 2 million people. If you don't take scale (degree of difficulty) into account, you can't make a legitimate comparison. It's not a million to one, but it's much larger than one to one.

[Thondalar]

Life expectancy, voting and wage demographics, real GDP per capita.

Is it normal for scientists to make such broad statements based only on one source of data? You base liberty on voting and wage demographics? What about the fact we incarcerate a higher percentage of our population than any other country in the world, and a higher rate than we ever have in our history? Our per capita GDP is the highest in our history, but so is the number of our citizens on welfare. Taking only GDP numbers into account ignores the fact that our wealth disparity is the highest in our nation's history...you're taking an average as scientific evidence of an absolute? What the hell sort of scientist does that?

Privatizing introduces a profit motive. This is without question an extremely dangerous thing to have linked to water or police.

If that's the case, government has no motive what so ever. All government does is add a middle-man. I'll take privatized municipal services with public oversight over government-run municipal services with no public oversight any day.

[waywardgs]

If that's the case, government has no motive what so ever. All government does is add a middle-man. I'll take privatized municipal services with public oversight over government-run municipal services with no public oversight any day.

Who does the public oversight in your privatization of municipal services?

[Latrinsorm]

Is it normal for scientists to make such broad statements based only on one source of data?

Bro, if you're going to complain about my using life expectancy as a measure of life we should probably just stop now. But I am not easily discouraged, so...

You base liberty on voting and wage demographics? What about the fact we incarcerate a higher percentage of our population than any other country in the world, and a higher rate than we ever have in our history?

The more criminals we have incarcerated, the less can menace law-abiding citizens. Duhhh. We still don't catch 100% of criminals, but we're closer than we were pre-video, pre-DNA, pre-post-racial.

Our per capita GDP is the highest in our history, but so is the number of our citizens on welfare. Taking only GDP numbers into account ignores the fact that our wealth disparity is the highest in our nation's history...you're taking an average as scientific evidence of an absolute? What the hell sort of scientist does that?

I don't know what you mean by evidence of an "absolute". I assume you mean that all data I cite is wrong, to which I can easily link dozens of posts where I cite accurate data... but if I cited it it must be wrong... drat! You win this round.

[Thondalar]

Buying a car from Big Head DBag car dealership benefits Big Head DBag. That's not charity. You're required to pay taxes if you are a part of this economy and those taxes pay for roads. Does that mean roads are charity spending? It's just not true that any time somebody pays for anything that benefits another it's charity.

Big Head DBag isn't using the car. If you bought a car from him and gave it to someone else, that would be charity. Me paying taxes for roads isn't charity, it's me paying for a service I use. Me paying taxes for welfare is charity, forced on me by the government. I'm really not understanding what you're going through on this...it's not a difficult concept.

Charity is a great thing but I wouldn't go patting yourself on the back too hard about how it makes America great. Social programs only exist because we do not give enough money to charity to take care of these issues within our communities. If churches, families, communities and the people who live there could be counted on to be charitable we'd not have so many people on unemployment or welfare.

This is completely untrue. We have so many people on unemployment and welfare because the government allows them to be there. If my neighbor asks me for money, but I know he's going to spend it on crack and not diapers, I'm not going to give him any money. The government still will, though.

One could say that welfare is actually the exact opposite of charity. Charity is voluntary,...

On this we, agree. Which is why I've clarified it as forced charity.

...welfare programs have to be paid for from taxes because we, as a society, decided that there's value to do it and no one else is.

I have absolutely no problem with my tax money going to help mentally and/or physically disabled citizens. THAT is our responsibility as a society. Allowing able-bodied citizens to be comfortable in poverty is a kick in my nuts.

You may not like that I debunked the blackjack argument because you are gambling right now.

You didn't debunk anything, and I'm not gambling at all. Well, I am I guess, but it's with my own money, so it's ok.

If you face major health problems between now and the Jan 1 you may not be able to pay those bills. If you can't then we're looking at another bankruptcy or written off bad debt.

They have a great payment plan.

The more people that don't pay the more the rest of society has to chip in.

Pretty much what the ACA is built on...a few people getting benefits from the rest of us chipping in.

A real world example is FHA mortgage insurance. They took a beating on foreclosures so they not only raised mortgage insurance rates, they also made it a permanent fixture of FHA loans. All the people that gambled on home ownership with low down payments through FHA that lost, have caused the new home buyers who want FHA loans to pay much higher insurance premiums. That's how someone else's medical bills affect all of us.

Eh, not really. You're talking about an extra 1.75% or so, and you can cancel it after 78% loan to value...not to mention after 5% equity you can refinance through Fannie or Freddy and eliminate it completely. Regardless, this is a terrible example. The housing finance market is nothing even remotely similar to the healthcare market. You aren't going to have a run on sub-prime heart surgeries crashing the system. I get that you're trying to say a company could raise it's rates to cover the cost of people defaulting on their debt with them, and there is some degree of truth to that. ACA isn't going to cause a massive decrease in average medical bills just because another 2% of our population has health insurance. I'm curious what the real numbers are on that, by the way...I know we can look at the numbers for how many people have signed up through ACA, but is anyone tracking how many of those were completely uninsured prior? As in...weren't on Medicaid, didn't have different insurance, etc. I'm guessing that number is pretty small. Now, let's look at how many of those newly insured are going to face catastrophic health issues that would have ruined them financially prior to insurance, but now they're insured...that number would be even smaller. Certainly not large enough to have any demonstrable effect on healthcare prices as a whole.

[Latrinsorm]

Allowing able-bodied citizens to be comfortable in poverty is a kick in my nuts.

If it's so comfortable, how come you aren't on welfare anymore?