great Presidential speech

[jjktunes]

Easy Mojo don't break a string.

[heinsite]

JJ--NO, he does NOT make sense to me.Mojo, thank you again for logic and truth, nothing like it.jj--PLEASE do not trivialize what another forum person says is the truth, espeicially on such a personal level. do you think he's friggin' lying to us? I DON'T. and based on Mojo's posts, he's one of the sane-est folks on this board. AND ALL YOU GOT IS "DON'T BREAK A STRING?" we'll all accept your apology, but here on Taxi, based on my own experience, that is hard to come by. Mojo is a guy that believes in God--i DO NOT. but i continue to believe in people. my detriment i guess. and i believe in the truth, and i believe that Mojo has NO reason to be spewing BS. THIS IS SERIOUS SH(T MAN, but maybe too many of us have it made as far as health care is concerned. actually MY FAMILY DOES, but who started the thread? and why? talk among yourselves. but DO NOT dis a respected and logic based dude like Mojo. you just look stupid.warren hein

[cyndy]

Just curious here..Have any of you had the pleasure of being a participant in government-controlled healthcare?I have.My children have a percentage of Indian blood, so I've spent untold numbers of hours at the "Indian Hospital/Clinic" over the years. If you want to see inefficiency at its finest, spend a day with a person who's seeing a doctor there. Better bring your lunch and dinner, though ... you're gonna be there a while.And then, down the road ... when you reach the last 4 months of the fiscal year, it's not uncommon to be told that there's not enough money for your needed medical care, so your child will have to wait 'til next year. This isn't hearsay. It's first-hand.I suppose it probably runs neck-and-neck with the government-run VA Hospital. Last I checked, people weren't exactly real excited about puttin' their loved ones there.Right offhand, I honestly can't think of one thing the government runs/controls that's so successful that I want to applaud it.P.S. - By the way, the inefficiency at the government-run healthcare facility was the same through the years, whether the president at the time was a Democrat or a Republican.

[jjktunes]

Sept 17, 2009, 8:40pm, heinsite wrote:JJ--NO, he does NOT make sense to me.Mojo, thank you again for logic and truth, nothing like it.jj--PLEASE do not trivialize what another forum person says is the truth, espeicially on such a personal level. do you think he's friggin' lying to us? I DON'T. and based on Mojo's posts, he's one of the sane-est folks on this board. AND ALL YOU GOT IS "DON'T BREAK A STRING?" we'll all accept your apology, but here on Taxi, based on my own experience, that is hard to come by. Mojo is a guy that believes in God--i DO NOT. but i continue to believe in people. my detriment i guess. and i believe in the truth, and i believe that Mojo has NO reason to be spewing BS. THIS IS SERIOUS SH(T MAN, but maybe too many of us have it made as far as health care is concerned. actually MY FAMILY DOES, but who started the thread? and why? talk among yourselves. but DO NOT dis a respected and logic based dude like Mojo. you just look stupid.warren heinI like and respect Mojo, and also know he is a good enough man to still have a little humor even on a serious subject like this . You are going off on me because I said "don't break a string" come on . I haven't even come close to saying things and name calling as most here on the forum. I pm Mojo for advice on song writing and other things. I know what an intelligent guy he is. Mojo if I offended you I'm sorry I may be wrong but it seems like everybody else can say what they want but if I say "don't break a string" I get slammed. Maybe I don't belong here so from now on I'll just keep it all music and quit trying to be apart of the big taxi forum family. I know this kinda thing that Mojo is talking about happens all the time to people. I have not said one time "HEY LETS KEEP HEALTH CARE JUST LIKE IT IS " I have said plenty of times that it needs to be fixed .Warren Hein I have agreed with most everything that has been said on this subject, so tell me why you say I don't make sense. This is what don't make sense. Because I don't think that a government run health care system is the answer, I am labeled as someone that thinks we should just let people dye if they are poor and can't afford the care they need. IT NEEDS TO BE FIXED do I know how to fix it ? NO . Do you ? NO. Can I share my opinion ? Well I thought I could.

[heinsite]

hello Cyndy,your pont is VERY WELL TAKEN...and why in the hell would you NOT want to see a better system? who wll make it better for YOU? honest question, knowing little of your circumstance, but are you trusting the insurance cos. to do it? i live in CA, and the VA is pretty moderately respected here (but NOT always...) but again, are we going to try to make it better, or leave the entire system as crappy as it is? honest question, and i mean NO disrespect. whose plan do you think will work? we obviously NEED a plan/s. who has the guts to propose it? who is proposing to try to do something about the crappy system we have? the best,warren

[mojobone]

Sept 17, 2009, 12:55pm, ggalen wrote:It's strictly a monetary calculation based on statistics.And a rather striking example of what Steven Levitt refers to as information asymmetry."In the late 1990s, the price of term life insurance fell dramatically. This posed something of a mystery, for the decline had no obvious cause. Other types of insurance, including health and automobile and homeowner's coverage, were certainly not falling in price. Nor had there been any radical changes among insurance companies, insurance brokers, or the people who buy term life insurance. So what happened?The Internet happened. In the spring of 1996, Quotesmith.com became the first of several websites that enabled a customer to compare, within seconds, the price of term life insurance sold by dozens of different companies. For such websites, term life insurance was a perfect product. Unlike other forms of insurance-including whole life insurance, which is a far more complicated financial instrument--term life policies are fairly homogeneous: one thirty-year, guaranteed policy for $1 million is essentially identical to the next. So, what really matters is the price. Shopping around for the cheapest policy, a process that had been convoluted and time-consuming,was suddenly made simple. With customers able to instantaneously find the cheapest policy,the more expensive companies had no choice but to lower prices. Suddenly customers were paying $1 billion less a year for term lif insurance." from Freakonomics, A Rogue Economist Explains The Hidden Side Of EverythingI think this may have implications that could be useful in unraveling the crisis we're facing. Sunshine is a great disinfectant. Maybe we don't need a huge, expensive new bureaucracy, if we can apply some truth in labeling laws to the insurance business and provide a public system of coverage levels in plain English that anyone can understand-I think the biggest problem we have is that nearly no-one understands what their coverage is, which makes it dang hard to argue with doctors, hospitals, lawyers and insurance execs. Certainly, it's impossible to shop like a smart consumer when we don't have a clue what we're buying.

[mojobone]

Hey, no offense taken, Jay, and no apology necessary, though I'd prefer if you kept your links on-topic-I hear the prayer guys got let off with a warning, btw. Back on topic, I tend to think if we had a public option, natives would at least have access to the same minimum level of care as anybody else, though I doubt it would happen on the reservations-Indians are shamefully mistreated by our government to this day. I expect everybody that doesn't assimilate will be suckin' hind tit forever.

[toddt]

Sept 17, 2009, 9:00pm, cyndy wrote:Just curious here..Have any of you had the pleasure of being a participant in government-controlled healthcare?I have.My children have a percentage of Indian blood, so I've spent untold numbers of hours at the "Indian Hospital/Clinic" over the years. If you want to see inefficiency at its finest, spend a day with a person who's seeing a doctor there. Better bring your lunch and dinner, though ... you're gonna be there a while.And then, down the road ... when you reach the last 4 months of the fiscal year, it's not uncommon to be told that there's not enough money for your needed medical care, so your child will have to wait 'til next year. This isn't hearsay. It's first-hand.I suppose it probably runs neck-and-neck with the government-run VA Hospital. Last I checked, people weren't exactly real excited about puttin' their loved ones there.Right offhand, I honestly can't think of one thing the government runs/controls that's so successful that I want to applaud it.P.S. - By the way, the inefficiency at the government-run healthcare facility was the same through the years, whether the president at the time was a Democrat or a Republican.Hi Cyndy,I've only had the pleasure of living in such a publicly-run system. It most definitely has its faults here in the UK, but it's also very positively viewed here too.Just because non-private medical is a shambles for the Native Americans doesn't mean it's not possible to get it right (especially when re-election is dependent on it) - most of Europe is proof of that, and our satisfaction levels with our healthcare system tend to be much higher than yours.Mojobone: Freakonomics was a great book. I'm sure more information would assist with health insurance, though it's a lot more complicated than life insurance (we all have the pre-existing condition for the latter, and except in rare cases, the validity of a claim can't really be disputed!).It was my impression that the "simple-labeling" of health insurance was going to be achieved through the Exchange.

[aimusic]

I'm with tt on this one....Coming from South Africa where if you don't have private medical aid (as we call it, not insurance) then the state of the government run hospitals is almost like stepping into your death bed...Coming to the UK - I discovered the NHS, a government run entity and in my opinion... is BLOODY brilliant... granted a lot of people here in the UK bitch and moan about it (purely because they don't know how sh*t the rest of the world has it and take it for granted), and coming from a place where I was... it is literally chalk and cheese.If the US every proposed something similar to the NHS system, I would support it - but then again, this is just my opinion.Love and light everyone!B

[toddt]

Speaking of the big/incompetent government issue, I pulled this piece off a Digg comment (I don't know if the author pulled it from somewhere else):I am a conservative.This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.And then I log on to the internet -- which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration -- and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.