third-8

home

low info info

--- On Mon, 10/12/09, “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com wrote:

From: “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com
Subject: health plan
To:
Date: Monday, October 12, 2009, 4:34 PM
If anybody, the Democrats or otherwise, are at all surprised by this, they are idiots.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091012/ap_on_go_co/us_health_care_overhaul_insurers

As I have said all along, there is nothing in this proposal that will do anything to keep prices
down, including prices jacked up by the insurers simply because they can -- they are not
being stopped from jacking up their already jacked up prices.

Even the controversial public option was not going to do a lot to cut prices -- because the
price for that would not be likely to be more than a bit less than the insurers charge because
it was not going to be Medicare because the Democrats cut out the link. But geez, at least
get that little bit!

Why are we talking all about these details and whether anything will work anyway? All we
should be doing is extending the existing Medicare coverage to all, but those under the
current Medicare age of 65 have to pay a regular premium, like an insurance plan. The only
argument would be how that premium price would be set. We already know Medicare works
beautifully -- no room for arguing it won't work and will be a horror of socialism. Yet, if people
would prefer their own private insurance, fine let them have it instead.

And if private insurers can't do as well or better than Medicare for all -- that is, compete
effectively -- then why would we want to keep them around anyway any more than we would
not want to keep around any business that if not effective?

Why are we trying to design something from scratch -- and argue about every little detail as
if we had no idea whether it would work -- when it already exists?

Kevin

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:05:25 -0700
From: john_@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: health plan
To: m_e@hotmail.com
you can't save the last guy

it most wmphatically does not exist

John

--- On Mon, 10/12/09, “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com wrote:

From: “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: “john” <john_@yahoo.com>
Date: Monday, October 12, 2009, 7:16 PM

You failed to say what you meant. What you actually wrote is not what you meant, it is
completely rediculous. Of course Medicare exists -- which is what I said. You can't say it
doesn't exist.

"Why are we trying to design something from scratch ... when it already exists?"

Kevin

Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:45:21 -0700
From: john_@yahoo.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: m_e@hotmail.com

Medicare covering everyone is not Medicare: there is no group being subsidized by
another group.

John

--- On Tue, 10/13/09, “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com wrote:

From: “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: “john” <john_@yahoo.com>
Date: Tuesday, October 13, 2009, 6:20 PM

There's nothing about Medicare requiring one group to subsidize another. That
is merely how it has been funded, rather than from some other source. They
could change its funding source any time they want.

But they don't have to. And they don't have to in order to extend it to everyone.
Just those under 65 have to pay for it themselves -- through monthly premiums
-- rather than the government pay for it for them.

Same program, a single program, just different payment for different people.

Kevin

--- On Wed, 10/14/09, “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com wrote:

From: “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: “john” <john_@yahoo.com>
Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 12:25 PM

Actually, the "last guy" is already saved under our current system. Even if he
goes broke and doesn't have insurance, at that point Medicaid pick up the
tab.

So, that isn't want it is about. It is about the other people. And, of course, it is
so that the "last guy" might not have to be the last guy after all, if he could
just get to a doctor in time, instead of not until it is too late, and not go
downhill in the first place.

Kevin

Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:17:48 -0700
From: john_@yahoo.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: m_e@hotmail.com

functionally, your blather makes no difference. the real thing that's going on is
when you try to save the last guy the price goes up. there is no large economy
size.

John

Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:02:45 -0700
From: john_@yahoo.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: m_e@hotmail.com

when I say "you can't save the last guy" I'm talking not about extending
some medical aid or other to every last single two armed, two legged
creature. I'm talking about the terminal lung cancer case, or the 107 year
old man looking up in horror as they kick start his heart yet one more
agonizing time.
If you look at it as a graph of effort required against additional life gained,
you realize that for each of us, someday, that graph is going to go where
the wild goose goes. I mean there isn't enough wealth or equipment or
expertise on earth to ultimately save any one of us. Just ask yourself how
much longer the average billionaire-- who you would think has 1000 times
as much access to our holy grail of medical care as the average
millionaire-- lives beyond the millionaire's life span.
They say that the cost of anything is the value of the next most expensive
thing you have to forego to get it. How much are you willing to enervate the
vitality of your country, how many other goals will we have to forego to claw
our way ever closer (but in ever smaller increments) to this PIPE DREAM?
As the administrators and lawyers (both private and gummint) climb ever
higher in number, ask yourselves how much true medical value is being
added.

John

P.S. http://www.dad2.info/index.html

--- On Fri, 10/16/09, “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com wrote:

From: “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: “john” <john_@yahoo.com>
Date: Friday, October 16, 2009, 10:16 PM

Well, OK, that's all fine. But that's not what this "universal" health care
debate is about -- other than that the topic did come up, in the context of
giving people information so they could decide how they wanted to
handle such situations -- and the GOP turned it into a scare tactic to use
against ANY health care reform by wrongly claiming they were planning to
have death panels to kill you.

Kevin

Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:44:23 -0700
From: john_@yahoo.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: m_e@hotmail.com

that's all fine??!

I bring up the fundamental real world reason why this is a collossal
bugaboo that gummint can't possibly handle without an infusion of
saints, angels, and magic, and that's all you can say? If these
collectivist dreamers weren't trying to cook the books in their little
ideological heads, even they'd have to admit that it boils down to a little
bit of increasing people running around in hospitals (probably mostly
record keepers) and a lot of soaking the rich, which is the real thing
that makes their pulse quicken slightly and their eyes get big.

John

--- On Mon, 10/19/09, “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com wrote:

From: “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: “john” <john_@yahoo.com>
Date: Monday, October 19, 2009, 7:08 AM

No, you are way off base. They are making individuals pay for the
insurance themselves, not tax dollars. Only poor people will get any
subsidy. The plan does not include any new tax on the rich.

Nobody is soaking the rich. But frankly the rich have stolen way more
than their fair share, so if someone were to soak them, it would only
be fair as a return of what they stole. No one does a billion dollars of
work! No one even does 100 million dollars of work. All that kind of
money is is theft from the rest of us.

Kevin

--- On Tue, 10/20/09, “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com wrote:

From: “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: “john” <john_@yahoo.com>
Date: Tuesday, October 20, 2009, 9:28 PM

The people you are saying are "every last person" are already mostly covered. Certainly 95% of those people are
on Medicare already anyway! The drastically overwhelming number of "last guys" are going to be over 65. So, they
have no bearing on the health plan we are talking about for under 65.

AND, the idea behind making everyone sign up is because they feel that the majority of people who don't sign up
are the young and healthy. That is, they figure they will have a lot of people signing up for insurance and paying
into the pot who will not be using it because they are healthy. They know it will cost more by letting the others in
too, but they figure they will make more than that from the healthy people forced to sign up. Mind you, this was the
plan from the INSURERS, this is what THEY want; they are not planning to shortchange themselves.

That is, they want to force a lot of people who don't need insurance to get it and pay. And they don't want any price
controls on that either -- they want a captive audience and the ability to gouge them. That is where the "subsidy" is
coming from, not from a tax increase that no one has proposed. But, since the lawmakers won't do anything to
bring prices down, they find they have to subsidize a bunch of people who just don't have $500 or $600 a month to
pay for it (once you turn 60, cheapest HMO plan out there will be over $600 a month), and that is where the cost to
the government of this plan comes in.

No, someone who spends 8 hours a day organizing 1,000 other people to do the work is worth 8 hours of pay.
Besides, no one organizes 1,000 people, They organize 20 people who are the supervisors, who organize 150
other people, who are the on-scene leaders, or crew leaders or whatever. But yes, the guy at the top would like
you to think that he is personally and alone is organizing all 1,000. No, he is not. He just tells someone else to do it
-- because he only has 8 hours to the day and can't do the work of 1,000 people -- so certainly should not get
such pay as 1,000 people would get.

But actually, they are now taking the pay of more like 1,500 or 2,000 people -- in reality! The longtime standard
has been that the CEO should get the pay of 30 of the average workers. Of course, in the U.S., they always took
more, although not in Europe. But nothing remotely close to what they are fleecing -- not fleecing, downright
robbing -- now. Back in the early 1970s, the average CEO was getting the pay of 45 of his average workers. Now
that has gone up more than astronomical to something like 1,500 of his average workers! That makes the robber
barons of another era look like a bunch of nice and reasonable people!

So, to tax away a bit of that so they end up with only the pay of say 1,300 of their average workers -- I have no
problem with that whatsoever. After that tax, we should still put them all in prison. And only a fool would say
otherwise. I think they guy who robs you on the street corner of you wallet is a much better guy -- because he isn't
stealing anywhere near so much.

Kevin

Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:32:45 -0700
From: john_@yahoo.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: m_e@hotmail.com

I am not way off base on what it's going to cost if there's an
insurance pool that, by law, must include each and every "last guy".
YOU are looking through bullshit colored-glasses.
And by the way, if a person organizes 1000 persons so that they
are productive instead of sitting around with their finger up, then he
is worth 1000 persons or at least 500. Give me a world run by
these types, as long as they mind their p's and q's and eventually
filter out the genuine criminals among them (to their benefit just as
much as the little guy), as opposed to a world of people who have
not faced having a business, that they created, fail.

John

Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:57:28 -0700
From: john_@yahoo.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: m_e@hotmail.com

You are being more commie-like (and god-like) than I think you mean to when you are willing to stand up and
categorically state that no individual could possibly be responsible for the creation of $ 1 Billion of value for the
human race.
I DO have a problem with the rich being able to pull in more dollars than it seems anybody could be worth,
though I recognize that there are other factors than a nose to the grindstone forty hours a week, such as risk
taking, doing your risk/reward homework so that you can evaluate those risks and truly bet on winners without
being a slot feeding idiot headed for a crash like so many of these "momentum investors" we seem to be
breeding. Like being willing to have "skin in the game" (no bailouts) when you are actually the only real
interpreter of the will of the people and the only real enumerator and evaluator of the resource allocation
needed to accomplish the will of the people. I'm talking about speculators, not government central planners
(remember the food preparer who never eats at his own establishment), not some smarmy politician who either
has some unrealistic idealistic ax to grind or who (same fellow after a few years) is all too susceptible to
corruption.
Unlike you, to whom government apparently seems an absolute good, I ascribe a lot of our problems, including
wealth imbalances, to unholy alliances of various power centers with government, and after securing the borders
our constant demand of people we let be the government should be that government remain pure in its defense
of the free life of citizens within the borders.
Hypothesis: government can't regulate anything, only stop things.
This can be valuable in areas such as murder, where a more advanced society is possible when your life is
less likely to become some warlord's bargaining chip.
As far as regulation goes, it seems to me that the self regulation by professionals who can determine their
interests and discipline unruly associates is far more likely to produce an optimum situation of overall freedom
and prosperity than the efforts of whoever happens to become a bureaucrat-- whether the idealist, the
chronically insecure or the brain dead. If the professionals are shielded from the rage of the public (who will
exact the stiffest penalty of all: closing of the wallets!) because the government upholds the precepts of must
never happen again and too big to fail, then that's a whole different game (the one we seem to be playing for
decades) but that's BECAUSE of the government (and doofus electorates, and everybody must be assigned a
government worker to prevent his being defrauded, and everybody must be equal with a capital "=" sign to the
point where every swingin' dick works for the government whether he has a dick or not).
The other point to remember is that we are here due to the BENEFITS of systems involving warlords, religious
fanaticism and things of this nature, and if civilization becomes too uppity and screw-uppy, a big enough stumble
may necessitate the human race having to navigate through earlier systems AGAIN.
In other words, it's like the earlier systems are in a foundational position relative to human societies rather than
a "historical background" position.
A lot of people are, as always, ready to do anything required to enhance their own power. It just seems to me
sometimes that this increasingly means turning the populace into more robot-like or rock-like beings who leap
only upon explicit instruction or upon looking around and noticing everyone else's leaps.
Civilization tends to concentrate and amplify human nature. If this means humans have to "denature"
themselves into hive creatures then I think that's too bad.
Where am I going with this? I don't know.

John

--- On Thu, 10/22/09, “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com wrote:

From: “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: “john” <john_@yahoo.com>
Date: Thursday, October 22, 2009, 2:52 AM
Now I know the topic at hand was the plan for "universal" health care.

As for this other topic, the problem throughout all your arguments is that you deny and are blind to the reality
all around you and the truths and substitute your wishes and fantasies in their place. That's because you
have substituted blind belief/blind faith for your own consideration of matters. You are a true believer in what
somebody else told you to believe.

Kevin

Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:16:34 -0700
From: john_@yahoo.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: m_e@hotmail.com

ha ha got you to go ad hominem on my ass...
if I weren't bored with this I'd go on with something about academics being more concerned with their own
tenures, perquisites and imaginary innortality waiting to be delivered to them through the ree-foe-ahm'd
healthcare system than they care about creeping socialism, economic idiocy and social decline.

John

-- On Fri, 10/23/09, “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com wrote:

From: “m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: “john” <john_@yahoo.com>
Date: Friday, October 23, 2009, 9:36 PM

But you see, there you go again. (If Reagan said that, I can too).

Academics might very well be more concerned with their own tenures, perquisites and imaginary
innortality, but that has nothing to do with the "universal" health care debate.

And again, there is no proposal for free health care. All the proposals make you buy a policy yourself
and pay for it. Even the proposals for a federal option are not suggesting that be given away -- you
will have to pay for it just like any private policy, with the premiums paid by policy holders paying for
the coverage in full. It is just thought that with no profit incentive, and possibly with a bigger patient
pool, the government will be able to offer lower premiums -- but they're not going to be anywhere
near free, just a little bit less than private insurers. And the premiums paid by the patients would have
to cover the cost of insurance in full - nothing being offered for free under any government plan.

Kevin

Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:14:38 -0700
From: john_@yahoo.com
Subject: RE: health plan
To: m_e@hotmail.com

this is where I find flaw with the reasoning: first level is "if it's too big a problem for any individual,
join a group and fight on", second level is " if it's too big for any group, give it to the government
and fight on". the government, if you go all the way with this, A) can't possibly win through
because the fight to give even one single human being immortality would bankrupt any
government on earth and B) in its rush to bankruptcy is where all the evil would be realized. First
you give increasing amounts of power to government agencies to "control" private enterprises
who happen to be providing some kind of service in the area. Second, after you have taken
away that amount of private wealth and have effectively made some portion of the time of some
of the most effective and well-off people into government-employed time, you have people
desertimg the system in various ways and so you have to have some more bureaucracy because
you had to pass laws that made it mandatory to have some level of health insurance. Now you
are way down the road and the shape of things to come loses some of its mist. Lo and behold,
the agent you pay for insurance, your pharmacist, the doctor you go to is in the same
government employees' union as the records worker or the postal clerk, and about as motivated.
Medical research dries up and the critical mass of "people who vote for more government" has
ratcheted up. Soon, we vote ourselves a totalitarian dictatorship because who of us faceless
grey suited drudges gives a shit about anything but getting a little more gummint largesse going.
This is some of the invigilance that's going to buy us a prison planet: turn it over to government,
forget about the individual exerting any self reliance, initiative, self control or having any of the
ideals that would make him behave that way: the culture is getting to be all about "I'm small and
weak, the government is big and kind, where else would I turn to get help?"

This is the end of the continuum I conceive we are on, and this, in my humble opinion, is the
direction we are going. I love to watch what science does but i am not one of the possessors of
the faith (and it is a religious faith, just like theism, atheism and animism) that science will always
pull the human race out of conditions caused by malaise of the masses and govermnent policies
that, intentionally or not, result in turning out more and more citizens whose mores consist of
figuring out all the ways they are weak, dependent pigs and bean counters of their victimization
which will get them more subsidized whatever.

Make your answer short and I will let you have the last word when I put this up on dad2.info.

John

Saturday, October 24, 2009 8:33 PM
From:
“m_e” <m_e@hotmail.com
View contact details
To:
“john” <john_@yahoo.com>

Your argument is so completely into fantasyland that there is no point in addressing it.

But for one thing, no one is talking about immortality. They are merely talking about health
insurance.

Kevin