US Politics Mega-thread - Page 580

On October 30 2013 03:23 Thomas Sowell wrote:
Price controls! If you don't like the price, just change it!

Let's just use our imaginations for a minute. Whenever I see huge inflated prices, the first thing I think is, "well, there is a real profit to be made undercutting those prices!" After all, the cost of keeping a patient in a room for a night should be nowhere near $760. I'm sure it could be done for less than half that cost.

But what would happen if I were to open my own hospital? Can you even imagine the avalanche of paper work and regulations and lawyers and health inspectors that would hail down upon me, either resulting in me shutting down completely or forcing me to massively raise my prices?

Of course we will be told that all of these regulations and controls and permits and certifications etc. etc. are for the public safety, but what it effectively creates are massive barriers to entry into the market, which is what keeps costs so high. That $68,000 bill buys the illusion of safety.

I've given people IV's before. It took a couple hours of training and about 5 minutes to administer. The solution itself is pretty cheap. You could give people IV's for a couple bucks a day in base cost. The other $1480 comes from where? Laws, regulations, lawsuits, permits, certifications, middle men... People will always point to the uninsured but that's been shown again and again to be a small percentage of the costs associated with health care.

On October 30 2013 03:52 farvacola wrote:
Don't worry zlefin; he's given people IV's before, therefore he is in a place of immense expertise when it comes to the cost implications of healthcare.

On October 14 2013 03:32 Djzapz wrote:

Consistent in your cheap arguments, farva. Can't be bothered to ever make an effort when you can just dismiss everything by insinuating that others are stupid. So lazy.

On October 14 2013 03:44 Djzapz wrote:

Part of me is getting frustrated with you because you probably don't even realize how cheap and ridiculous you are. You dismiss everything with the back of your hand and I'm convinced that there's some kind of psychological mechanism in your head that makes you not even realize how dishonest you are and it feeds that weak little ego of yours and makes you feel like you're actually doing this like a respectable person.

On October 30 2013 01:44 packrat386 wrote:

Give people health insurance who can't get it otherwise? The problem with public option is that it's expensive, not that it doesn't address the problem.

On October 29 2013 04:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
Some evidence that the Volcker rule isn't such a hot idea.


FT Alphaville article: Link
NY Fed paper cited: Link

Twenty-two percent of Americans identify as libertarian or lean libertarian, according to a new poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute.

Seven percent are "consistent" libertarians, while 15 percent lean libertarian, according to the survey.

The poll found that libertarians tend to be non-Hispanic white, young and male. Ninety-four percent are non-Hispanic whites, 62 percent are below age 50 and 68 percent are men.

Libertarians also typically identify with the GOP -- 45 percent are Republicans while five percent are Democrats.

On October 30 2013 04:52 farvacola wrote:

What's funny is that your argument is just as cheap as mine, only it has a bunch of meaningless text attached. Your personal experience in giving IV's means absolutely nothing, and in concert with the essentially question begging, "let's use our imaginations", it becomes clear that you are less interested in proving something and more interested in simply forcing others to see the world as you do. "Regulations are the enemy" is not a piece of evidence, contrary to what you may think.

On October 30 2013 04:50 Sub40APM wrote:

First of all, by the time Lehman was bankrupt, the banks became conduits for Fed's bailouts, and while the dealers might have been engaged in purchases of bonds from various hedge funds -- which by the way is very debatable (1) because a sizeable amount of hedge fund assets were frozen in the Lehman estate (2) a lot of those 'purchases' were banks taking onto their balance sheets things that they put off their balance sheets for accounting-arbitrage but they then had to bailout to preserve their reputations with the bigger clients -- they werent engaged in real market operation as inter-bank lending simply stopped.

So this idea that noble liquidity providers will be there in a crisis is just wrong -- capital adequacy ratios of Basel III, not yet implemented, would not have saved any of the broker-dealers and even the glorious JPM would have gone down. The reason for the Volkner rule is to prevent this exact outcome of a big bank, big banks that are too intertwined into the payment economy and the asset preservation game to be allowed to fail and everyone knows it. Now if some -- or a series of -- hedge funds all blow up as long as they dont drag the big banks with them the way LTCM was going -- then the losers will be (a) the people whose receivables were securitized into bonds no longer having accesses to the cheapest possible loans (b) the investors in those hedge funds.

On October 30 2013 05:09 Thomas Sowell wrote:

Actually my experience giving IV's does mean something. Maybe not to you, but it showed me that nothing in the process of giving IV's costs $1,484. Nothing in the process could cost that much. The costs charged are external to the actual costs care.

I could just as easily argue that it doesn't cost $2000 to drive someone in an ambulance. The costs that go into that $2000 come from government erected barriers to entry into the market. Now maybe some of those barriers are good, this is not an either or anarchism/socialism dichotomy. The ideal is somewhere in between. But when you are paying $1400 for an IV and paying $2000 for a taxi to the hospital, clearly we are much too far on the side of excessive regulation.

As required by Congress, the EPA recently released annual greenhouse gas data “detailing carbon pollution emissions and trends broken down by industrial sector, greenhouse gas, geographic region, and individual facility.”

Interestingly, in 2012, coal-fired electricity generation increased while natural gas generation decreased considerably. This is counter to all the talk about the shale gas revolution (“bridge,” if you’re optimistic), including a line right in the first paragraph of the EPA press release — “The data, required to be collected annually by Congress, highlight a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions as more utilities switch to cleaner burning natural gas.”

Despite coal generation increasing, natural gas generation decreased so much that overall fossil fuel generation fell by 36.4 million MWh. Here’s a table with more details:



o, what made up for that electricity generation drop?

First and foremost, reiterating a recent statement by the International Energy Agency, it seems that energy efficiency and energy conservation did. However, the other main contributor to the cut in global warming pollution was clearly renewable energy generation, especially generation from wind energy. Wind power plants contributed a significant 17.7 million MWh of additional electricity generation in 2012.

On October 30 2013 05:23 ZeaL. wrote:
If your insurance is too shitty to cover anything and you get into an accident or have some medical emergency, what's the point of having insurance? This is really not too far removed from having the insurance mandate, it's not enough to have an insurance mandate if people buy shitty insurance that doesn't do anything insurance is supposed to.

And for those who think that people always make informed decisions about their lives can reflect on how much resistance there was to seat belts and airbags back in the day. "Well it's my right to not wear a seat belt, it's so damn uncomfortable and I'll never get into an accident!". "Lifesaving airbags? More like job killing,m overreaching government regulation!"

People are often too stupid to realize what is good for them. I normally wouldn't care if someone screws themselves but inability to pay for your own healthcare shifts the cost onto ME.

On October 30 2013 05:26 WolfintheSheep wrote:


That's a rather unjustified conclusion.

Most 1st world countries with full public health care have far more regulations and government control than yours, and lower costs.

On October 30 2013 05:25 DoubleReed wrote:
It only seems obvious to you, farva. Not obvious to these guys. The very notion that the answer isn't "gubmint bad" is shocking, overly complex, and deluded.

On October 30 2013 06:41 zlefin wrote:
Stop making bad conclusions and lying Sowell; go find the Time report on chargemaster prices and read it; it's not about government regulation, it's about prices being made up to make money.
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2136864,00.html
that'll tell where it is; I'm sure you can find a copy of Time at a local library and read it.

On October 30 2013 05:24 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

The broker-dealers were providing liquidity, but they didn't have unlimited ability to provide liquidity. Removing what liquidity they do provide doesn't help the situation. If part of the problem was not enough, than less isn't a solution.

Where and why that liquidity was being provided doesn't affect that story. If SIVs were failing because liquidity was being pulled, and the broker-dealers filled that gap, than wonderful. You can debate the merits of the SIVs, but you can't deny the benefit of having someone else in line to provide liquidity as a backstop.

As long as bank funding remains the same, market turmoil will still affect them. If money markets and hedge funds are pulling liquidity from the system, banks and broker-dealers will feel it.