You idiots

[mrgybe]

[swchandler]

"There must be something else you conservatives eat that liberal states don’t."


It would have to be their diet of lies.

[boggsman1]

ISO... historically , big Pharma has received almost 80% of its donations from Repubs .. Its not a secret as single payer would destroy their margins , so you can make your own conclusions .. get real

[isobars]

This isn't worth a lot of time for many reasons, but a) you did ask without a personal attack and b) it remains a relevant and highly divisive voting factor.

First, my complaints were about the VA, not Medicare. My experiences with Medicare have had minor problems (they refuse to pay for my chiropractic care, for example), but the VA kills people, slowly but certainly in my case and much more quickly in others.

Medicare For All, as a formal program, was socialized medicine ... the VA on steroids. That alone would scare the crap out of every American with any significant experience with the VA. Worse yet by far is that it was (is?) to be exclusive ... we wouldn't have the option to buy real health care.

Medicare, in today's incarnation, is not socialized medicine. People pay for it directly and voluntarily, they have an infinite variety of other options ranging from no care to strictly catastrophic care to highly tailored care, they let us choose our doctors, and we get to use real hospitals instead of the medieval, corrupt, uncaring, vile dungeons (I'll spare you my own pages of horror stories, common among thousands of vets and verified to me personally by literally dozens of medical providers and staffers) manifested in most VA hospitals. There is no reason to believe, and many specific reasons to doubt, that M for all will be any different from today's VA.

Medicare doesn't pay providers or drug manufacturers squat, so they have to dramatically overprice everything to break even. I have many hundreds of EOBs (billing statements from insurers including Medicare) showing that providers get somewhere between 10% and maybe 70% of the amount they bill. A medical widget I can buy at Walmart for $12 would be billed at $140 to Medicare. Ditto drugs.

Because of that, more and more providers are not accepting Medicare. I've had to pay thousands out of pocket for treatments and devices from providers who offered unique services and/or products I chose to try. Doctors began quitting medicine (and students avoiding med school) in droves since the spectre (and many cases, reality) arose of being treated like rats in cages working for meager fixed government-mandated wages in exclusive socialized medicine programs.

The basic, vital flaw in the OCA's preexisting condition clause hasn't changed since I discussed it here years ago: it allows people to wait until they get deathly ill before buying into it. Who in their right mind would buy insurance against any dread disease (or flood, or fire, or head-on collision, or broken finger) before it happened? The government's fix was to mandate Obamcare, and even then Obama had to flagrantly lie to the Congress to get it passed. On top of that, Hillarycare, the OCA poster child from hell, failed miserably in the two states that tested it under her oversight.

This isn't any form of attack, personal or otherwise. Rather, it's based on the dictionary: Why can't people who worship on the altar of fascism just move to Canada instead of trying to force it upon those who don't?

And as I and millions of others have stated regarding everything from health care to AGWA, why can't the government FIX problems rather than compounding them? (Never mind: just fixing them doesn't include complete control over the deplorable.)

[mac]

[isobars]

Besides our junk food obsession, there's the food pyramid's consistent heavy emphasis on sugar as our primary nutrition source. Of course, they don't CALL it sugar, but our bodies see through the deception and react accordingly with diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer, etc. Because ONE MAN faked the data and bludgeoned the Congress three generations ago into believing it is healthy, we and the rest of the world are being told that the very foundation of our diet should be sugar ... by any name BUT sugar. Eager, uninformed, uncaring, lazy, undisciplined, destitute, and/or immortal people worldwide swallow and follow that BS hook, line, and sinker to their graves.

[isobars]

I couldn't find a completely suitable thread for this observation, so I'll post this here with apologies to people whose only joy in life is working ... literally, their job.

The WSJ ran an article on a trend known as "Pls Fix". It refers to the wording in a late-night or mid-vacation text to an employee to "Pls fix the Bumstead account" or "Pls fix the Power Point". Its meaning is clear: "You'd GD better rewrite some giant document or completely redo some 80-page presentation and have it on my desk by the time I come in at 5 AM tomorrow."

Do ANY of you know ANYONE who would pay ANY attention to a boss who does ANYTHING like that more than once in an entire career? Is this concept real, or is it just the imagination and exaggeration of a writer desperate for a topic for the next edition?

I've worked for several blue chip corporations and for 8-10 different military commanding officers. Only once in all those years did one boss try that on me. He threatened my career if I didn't comply, not just for a weekend but for two years. I rubbed his nose in the regulations and cut back on my workload.

More power to the people who like that environment. I knew one such person, but I'm sure that attitude killed him many years ago. Do some bosses or corporations do that today?

[swchandler]

Actually, long long before the US Government's food pyramid, folks all over the world have been forever enthralled by the magic of sweetness in food. You can say the same about salt. Thinking that one could eliminate the taste and draw of sugar or salt in the food we eat would be a pipe dream.

Speaking for myself, I try to avoid processed sugars in the food that I eat. I don't have any refined sugar in my house. Yet, natural sugars in many foods have a purpose in our diets, but some degree of restraint is wise.

Salt, on the other hand, is something that I love. It is something that I would not want to go without. It's one of life's simple pleasures. If it kills me, so be it.

Fortunately, some of us are more genetically able to cope with sugar and other ingredients (like dairy goods) in the modern world. Others though, are not as genetically evolved to handle these foods as well. They are more stone age in the indigenous diets of their ancestors, which are arguably more basic and healthful overall. This is true in the pre-Columbian Americas, vast parts of Africa, and with most Pacific Islanders. Sadly, they pay a price eating a modern diet that we tend to tolerate with much less of a problem.

[cgoudie1]

There are bad bosses out there, in any discipline, but a lot less so in the
post Jack Welch era.

I work in Aerospace, so does my son. In my case I've had zero bad bosses
and only one bad CEO in a 40 year career. I'm thinking my industry isn't
all that strange, but I wouldn't want to work at Spacex.

Still, "controversial" probably gets more subscribers in any newspaper, even a digital one.

-Craig

[swchandler]

isobars, you have to admit that Medicare and the VA are apples and oranges in the scheme of things.

It must be noted that Medicare doesn't run any medical facilities like the VA does. While in the past, after the world wars in the 20th century, I'm sure that the VA might have been better able to focus and treat the injuries of war. While that might not be true today, maybe the VA needs to go as government-run medical facilities. For veterans today, think Medicare coverage for 100% of acceptable charges.

So, getting back to the idea of Medicare for All, why couldn't it follow the foundation and general ground rules of the Medicare program? Also, it must be remembered that Medicare only covers 80% of acceptable charges. Plenty of room for private insurance companies to cover the remaining 20%, or offer Medicare Advantage plans.