My Images | My Videos

Karma Level:

+ 54

Signed up:

6 years ago (2/12/05)

Last signed in:

1 year ago

Total time online:

84d 13h 19m

Awards

12 Awards

Staff Awards

Milestones [ Compare ]

August 26th, 2009

RT, stop adding useless shit

I remember when it didn't take 10 minutes to log in to the homepage, let alone the sign in page.

Posted 2 years ago by Trubo Comments (3)	+ 3 Ditto

Groups

1 Groups

RT movie nights! Why bother with a theater? Catch a flick right from your computer screen!

The Goods

BIRTHDAY

August 21st, 1987

Friends

57 Friends

Frostitute

FORUM MOD

alexthegreat

MustyMung

radar_love

Sponsor

hobbie

SITE ADMIN

BigBen

FORUM MOD

Bey

FORUM MOD

MikeStampede

Michael_JC

TKdademon

nothingxjr

blank

Comments

[ Add a Comment ] [ Watch Comments ] [ View All Comments ]

PeppyHare66

Sponsor

Paul Krugman on why private insurance doesn't work:

it's very difficult for the private sector to provide such insurance, because health insurance suffers from a particularly acute case of a well-known economic problem known as adverse selection. Here's how it works: imagine an insurer who offered policies to anyone, with the annual premium set to cover the average person's health care expenses, plus the administrative costs of running the insurance company. Who would sign up? The answer, unfortunately, is that the insurer's customers wouldn't be a representative sample of the population. Healthy people, with little reason to expect high medical bills, would probably shun policies priced to reflect the average person's health costs. On the other hand, unhealthy people would find the policies very attractive.

You can see where this is going. The insurance company would quickly find that because its clientele was tilted toward those with high medical costs, its actual costs per customer were much higher than those of the average member of the population. So it would have to raise premiums to cover those higher costs. However, this would disproportionately drive off its healthier customers, leaving it with an even less healthy customer base, requiring a further rise in premiums, and so on.

Insurance companies deal with these problems, to some extent, by carefully screening applicants to identify those with a high risk of needing expensive treatment, and either rejecting such applicants or charging them higher premiums. But such screening is itself expensive. Furthermore, it tends to screen out exactly those who most need insurance.

PeppyHare66

Sponsor

People sue for the most trivial things, doesn't mean that the suit will actually be brought to court.

Okay, it won't get brought to court. So there's no reason for a hospital to help somebody dying on the street if the government doesn't require a hospital to do it.

Private practice would actually become feasible again to doctors rather than working at a hospital due to the influx of people no longer being admitted by the hospital, along with the insane amount of restrictions on how private practice may operate being lifted.

How decent do you think the healthcare is going to be when these private doctors are only supported by meager plebs who can't afford to spend money on healthcare anyway?

Sorry to hear that.

You should be. The MGIB brought amazing growth in standard of living that lasted for two decades when all those WWII vets went to school and became the great thinkers and innovators of the 50's and 60's. It pays off in the long run when people are afforded the financial opportunity to go to college and the real world and succeed.

However, most of the money that people have to pay for treatment comes from usage of all of the high tech equipment they employ so as to pay off their extremely high fixed costs

You're asking the hospital to over-invest in your individual life without compensation when they could be applying those resources to other people.

No, I'm asking for society to invest in my life, because not being at full health is a burden on everybody. Not just in what I owe the hospital every time I have to go back for a treatable condition, but because an unhealthy person is a less productive person. Their quality of life is worse, they get stressed out, they get distracted from more important things (job, family, etc) that ultimately make us less well off as a whole. Also, I'd prefer a world where less people die and more people are happy, but that's just me.

The problem with this is that the "public pool" for insurance is not reserved exclusively for insurance. Instead, revenues generated for this go to paying for other governmental programs that are beyond the government's real ability to pay for.

That's funny, because the healthcare bill going through Congress is deficit neutral.

Private companies can be just as wasteful too, especially in regards to insurance. Remember, that the first step for an insurance company adding a new customer, is to look for reason to deny them. They're not going to want to cover somebody that could potentially be a high risk, so they spend a significant amount of money pre-screening. That kind of administration is very wasteful. Ultimately it's profitable, but in the grand scheme of things it's wasteful.

So, why not increase the insurance pool so that such pre-screening measures aren't even necessary, because enough people are capable of paying in? Then we eliminate the pre-screening entirely, and if for some reason that's still not profitable enough for insurance companies, we'll use the subsidies that we already fork over to them now to balance the system? Sure, we still end up paying money, but the difference is that those high risk people can be covered, allowing them to go on with their lives to do bigger and better things than worry about insurance.

At any rate, I could give you a list of countries with imperfect health care systems that still cover more people at a lower cost to society. Find me an example of a 100% market based system that has worked before, and I'll concede.

PeppyHare66

Sponsor

No, the hospital will get sued. The chances of the suit actually going to trial and finding the hospital guilty are extremely small.

If a hospital isn't legally required to save people's lives, what are you suing them for? Not being nice enough to people?

It does if there are several hospitals in the area and one of them is notorious for its patients dying before ever getting to the hospital for treatment.

If there's no artificial standard upheld by the government, there's no reason why all hospitals won't become lax on who they provide care to. Why would they care about providing good press to people who can't afford to use their product?

I'm not sure how I'm supposed to argue against your misconception that all libertarians are excessively rich and do not face the troubles that plague the rest of society.

The day that I realized that I had 0 possibility of attending a 4-year school, living in an apartment, and being able to afford adequate medical and dental insurance all at the same time without getting significant support from my parents was the day I stopped being a libertarian.

First, I do not think it is legal for somebody else (taxpayers) being forced to pay for the treatment of others against their will.

Well that's what happens. Your money already goes to hospitals. One of the reasons they require so much money is because you have to pick up tab for uninsured Americans.

Hospitals prefer people with insurance over those without it since they are guaranteed payment for their services, regardless of what happens to the patient. The same can not be said for anyone without insurance.

Then it's a good thing that hospitals are required to save people's lives, but they're not necessarily required to provide treatment necessary to prevent an incident from happening again.

Let's say I have a heart attack, and have no insurance. If seek medical attention from a hospital, they're required to stabilize me, but they're not required to provide coronary artery bypass surgery I need to actually stop me from having a heart attack. So in all likelihood I'm going to have a heart attack again... and again... and again until I'm dead.

In the meantime, it costs money every time I have a heart attack too keep going back to the hospital and receive treatment for a disease that's not being fixed, when it would be much more cost efficient for me and the taxpayers to just fix me and get it over with. Oh yeah, it also means I wouldn't be dead, if you're worried about that at all.

And these payments are still a fraction of the true cost of the procedure and can be legally fought against during the years from ever having to repay them.

Stop thinking as an individual. Yeah, those payments can be fought, but in the end, those hospitals and doctors need to be paid, and somebody did end up paying it. And now you want to draw out more money in lengthy legal battles? Talk about wasteful spending. Not all of us can afford a lawyer, btw.

Neither did all of the other prominent leaders of Socialism. You can read about how their efforts turned out.

providing a public pool in which to evenly pool money and divide risk != government controlling people's lives or capital.

PeppyHare66

Sponsor

Because it's in the interests of the hospital to treat them, lest they receive bad press about their actions and go out of business or be sued.

A hospital can't be sued if we don't legally require them to treat injuries that threaten the loss of life, limb, or eyesight. The Hippocratic Oath is a legal standard for doctors. And bad press really doesn't have much to do with it, because when you're bleeding dry on the pavement you'll take whatever care you can get.

I never suggested this either. Government is not supposed to act like an insurance company as this is beyond the scope of government's role in society.

Only if you're a libertarian who has the means to support himself (or rich enough family). The rest of us have moments in our imperfect lives where we're vulnerable every now and then.

This is specifically what I'm against.

Really? Because that's what happens. When you suffer from a wound that leaves your intestines lying on the street, it takes lots of treatment to get your organs back in your stomach and fight the infections that are going to occur afterwards. It's a long process that requires lots of attention from doctors with large salaries, using expensive equipment and requires housing that could be used to cover somebody else that can afford it.

If somebody can't pay for that there are two options:

-they bleed out and die
-Somebody else (taxpayers) pays for them.

And ultimately, taxpayers do take up the tab, and the victim slowly and painfully makes payments that they never actually pay off for the rest of their lives.

So you would have the minority impose a tyranny over the majority, eh?

I don't think that creating a more efficient socialized system is tyranny.

Having said that, I'm not concerned what the majority thinks if they're all wrong. James Madison once wrote that the problem with a pure democracy is that it could lead to the unjust tyranny and oppression of 49% of the population by 51% of it.

PeppyHare66

Sponsor

So why should it stop with insurance? If somebody is injured on the side of the road, why require hospitals to even pick them up? If they can't afford healthcare, they should bleed out and die, right? If that's the society you prefer, that's fine, you just have to accept that if you ever have a financial problems beyond your control that you could be one of those unlucky guys that is left to die.

But if you draw a line where you say that the government should not evenly divide the risks amongst the population, but that hospitals should require to save a person's life who can't afford it, you're still going to end up covering them. If somebody requires $50,000 worth of operations, housing, and treatment to save life, limb, or eyesight, that money is going to be picked up from somebody. Guess who ends up paying the tab anyway? Hint: taxpayers.

Guess what, insurance companies lobby to have those checkups as a method pre-screening the patient so that they know the risk of covering that person and can charge you out the ass. Now, if only their were a way to divide that risk amongst everybody so that it's affordable all around the table...

PeppyHare66

Sponsor

In reply to Trubo, #1395:

As for it "working" in Canada, Germany, France, and other European countries, good luck trying to get decent (e.g. same day to a week difference between appointment and treatment) for anything serious after your forties.

Good luck finding any health care at all in the United States if you can't afford it.

In Canada, you may have to wait seven months to have a back injury taken care of, but in the United States some people have to go their entire lives dealing with injuries they can't afford to fix.

Post edited 12/13/09 9:36AM

Michael_JC

Posted 2 years ago	[ Reply ] [ Quote ] [ Conversation ]
It was a two-part series finale. The series ended up continuing later. Dexter was awesome.

no_good_name

GGG G U NOT

Posted 2 years ago	[ Reply ] [ Quote ] [ Conversation ]
yay turbo

TKdademon

Posted 2 years ago	[ Reply ] [ Quote ] [ Conversation ]
"And now let me tell you about all the guys I like better than you."

TKdademon

Posted 2 years ago	[ Reply ] [ Quote ] [ Conversation ]
Also an option.