US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6800

On February 09 2017 03:59 Thieving Magpie wrote:


You're talking about FEMA right?

https://www.fema.gov/national-flood-insurance-program

If you're really interested in the federal program running flood insurance just read up on it and let us know.

On February 09 2017 04:14 LegalLord wrote:
I think one small yet highly expensive piece of the puzzle that Kwark's analysis didn't address is that healthcare conditions that are resolved early on tend to be less expensive than ones that are put off until later. It would be an interesting experiment to see the general health of a society where simpler health goods and services - vaccinations, contraceptives, physicians, psychologists, general health advice, emergency services, dental care, and the like - are available free of charge for all citizens (and certain services like a yearly physical are mandatory), but no services of the more expensive kind are available (e.g. Chronic condition = death, no insulin injections are available). It would probably be about Cuba-like in its success rate, which is not that bad.

Also, costs of healthcare in the last year of life. Perhaps it's better to just let particularly unhealthy people die a year early rather than keep them on life support for a fortune. Sounds callous, but I don't think the reality really is.

On February 09 2017 04:22 RvB wrote:

Catastrophes are still not taken on by insurers. The damage can be in the billions. No insurer is willing to take such a risk even if reinsurance is possible.

On February 09 2017 04:22 RvB wrote:

Catastrophes are still not taken on by insurers. The damage can be in the billions. No insurer is willing to take such a risk even if reinsurance is possible.

Ever since Donald Trump was elected president in November, questions have been raised about the lease he signed to operate a luxury hotel in the Old Post Office Building in Washington, D.C.

The lease specifically says the lease holder cannot be a federal elected official. So critics repeatedly have called upon the federal General Services Administration to enforce its agreement, and make President Trump walk away from his deal to run the Trump International Hotel.

But Trump appears to have come up with his own way of trying to solve the lease problem: He has created a revocable trust — and parked his vast business interests in it.

The purpose of the trust is to create a firewall against conflict-of-interest allegations and to, in effect, remove himself from direct management of his businesses, such as the D.C. hotel. Documents now show that the president's son, Donald J. Trump Jr., is the new president of the company operating the D.C. hotel.

A GSA spokeswoman contacted by NPR had no comment on the status of the lease now that Trump has stepped back from direct management of his businesses and moved them into a trust. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

But the new arrangement has only escalated the criticism because the trust's tax ID number is Trump's Social Security number, and Trump "has the power to revoke the trust" to reclaim direct ownership.

In other words, even if his sons or other business associates are named as the officers of the various businesses, the profits flow back to one person: Donald J. Trump. In fact, one of the documents says, "The purpose of the trust is to hold assets for the exclusive benefit of Donald J. Trump."

Documents show that Trump resigned from positions in 488 entities as they were shifted into the revocable trust, and the trustees are his son Donald Jr. and the Trump Organization's chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg.

All of this has ethics experts fuming.

Law professor Steven Schooner, who teaches government contracting law at George Washington University, says Trump is still benefiting from the lease, even though the hotel now comes under the revocable trust.

On February 09 2017 04:25 LegalLord wrote:

Yes, that gets into the "death panel" issue. But often, it should be possible to see that the chance of a patient living a somewhat healthy life past a certain point is so small that it's better just to ease them towards death.

To be fair, though, perhaps we could use a medical staff with more affinity towards mathematics towards that end. American MD's are notoriously bad at math.

On February 09 2017 04:25 LegalLord wrote:

Yes, that gets into the "death panel" issue. But often, it should be possible to see that the chance of a patient living a somewhat healthy life past a certain point is so small that it's better just to ease them towards death.

To be fair, though, perhaps we could use a medical staff with more affinity towards mathematics towards that end. American MD's are notoriously bad at math.

On February 09 2017 04:33 TheTenthDoc wrote:


I don't think it's necessarily a problem of the medical staff (especially when it comes to ICUs, nurses and docs know the deaths are coming). It's more the problem of not allowing assisted suicide and making plug-pulling purely the responsibility of the person's family (or, if they thought ahead, a living will).

It doesn't help that on balance the societal attitude for Americans is very much "do everything you can to keep me breathing" which is why they recoil so heavily from even a hint of death panel. Then there's miraculous heavenly interventions to take into account...

On February 09 2017 04:36 KwarK wrote:

Death panels are a non issue. They're just a scare word for rationing. Nobody would expect their insurance coverage to outbid every other insurer to fly the best doctors in from around the world, and to hell with the cost. The insurance provider has already decided ahead of time which treatments they are willing to pay for and which they are not. Rationing is an inevitable part of any system in which demand outpaces supply, there is a finite supply of healthcare and, until people stop dying, an infinite demand for it.

Your insurance provider has looked at how much money they get and has decided an appropriate ration of healthcare to provide you with. If you need more than your ration, well, you're shit out of luck there.

It's the same thing that "death panels" do, only death panels are much better at resource allocation and aren't trying to maximize their profits.

WASHINGTON ― In 2009, the historian David Kaiser, then a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, got a call from a guy named Steve Bannon.

Bannon wanted to interview Kaiser for a documentary he was making based on the work of the generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe. Kaiser, an expert on Strauss and Howe, didn’t know Bannon from Adam, but he agreed to participate. He went to the Washington headquarters of the conservative activist group Citizens United, where Bannon was then based, for a chat.

Kaiser was impressed by how much Bannon knew about Strauss and Howe, who argued that American history operates in four-stage cycles that move from major crisis to awakening to major crisis. These crises are called “Fourth Turnings” — and Bannon believed the U.S. had entered one on Sept. 18, 2008, when Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke went to Capitol Hill to ask for a bailout of the international banking system.

“He knew the theory,” Kaiser said. “He obviously enjoyed interviewing me.”

Bannon pressed Kaiser on one point during the interview. “He was talking about the wars of the Fourth Turnings,” Kaiser recalled. “You have the American Revolution, you have the Civil War, you have World War II; they’re getting bigger and bigger. Clearly, he was anticipating that in this Fourth Turning there would be one at least as big. And he really made an effort, I remember, to get me to say that on the air.”

Kaiser didn’t believe global war was preordained, so he demurred. The line of questioning didn’t make it into the documentary — a polemical piece, released in 2010, called “Generation Zero.”

Bannon, who’s now ensconced in the West Wing as President Donald Trump’s closest adviser, has been portrayed as Trump’s main ideas guy. But in interviews, speeches and writing — and especially in his embrace of Strauss and Howe — he has made clear that he is, first and foremost, an apocalypticist.

In Bannon’s view, we are in the midst of an existential war, and everything is a part of that conflict. Treaties must be torn up, enemies named, culture changed. Global conflagration, should it occur, would only prove the theory correct. For Bannon, the Fourth Turning has arrived. The Grey Champion, a messianic strongman figure, may have already emerged. The apocalypse is now.

“What we are witnessing,” Bannon told The Washington Post last month, “is the birth of a new political order.”

Strauss died in 2007, and Howe did not respond to requests for comment. But their books speak for themselves. The first, Generations, released in 1991, set forth the idea that history unfolds in repetitive, predictable four-part cycles ― and that the U.S. was, and still is, going through the most recent cycle’s tail end. (In Generations, Strauss and Howe became perhaps the first writers to use the term “millennials” to describe the current cohort of young people.)

Strauss and Howe’s theory is based on a series of generational archetypes — the Artists, the Prophets, the Nomads and the Heroes — that sound like they were pulled from a dystopian young adult fiction series. Each complete four-part cycle, or saeculum, takes about 80 to 100 years, in Strauss and Howe’s reckoning. The Fourth Turning, which the authors published in 1997, focuses on the final, apocalyptic part of the cycle.

Strauss and Howe postulate that during this Fourth Turning crisis, an unexpected leader will emerge from an older generation to lead the nation, and what they call the “Hero” generation (in this case, millennials), to a new order. This person is known as the Grey Champion. An election or another event — perhaps a war — will bring this person to power, and their regime will rule throughout the crisis.

On February 09 2017 04:14 LegalLord wrote:
I think one small yet highly expensive piece of the puzzle that Kwark's analysis didn't address is that healthcare conditions that are resolved early on tend to be less expensive than ones that are put off until later. It would be an interesting experiment to see the general health of a society where simpler health goods and services - vaccinations, contraceptives, physicians, psychologists, general health advice, emergency services, dental care, and the like - are available free of charge for all citizens (and certain services like a yearly physical are mandatory), but no services of the more expensive kind are available (e.g. Chronic condition = death, no insulin injections are available). It would probably be about Cuba-like in its success rate, which is not that bad.

Also, costs of healthcare in the last year of life. Perhaps it's better to just let particularly unhealthy people die a year early rather than keep them on life support for a fortune. Sounds callous, but I don't think the reality really is.

On February 09 2017 04:46 chocorush wrote:
On the insurance issues. What people think of as "insurance" isn't what they actually want. Insurance is a financial product meant to smooth costs over time (pay premiums + copay over a lifetime, rather than footing large spikes of medical costs). It's not meant to save you money, but make the spending manageable by spreading the total costs over your lifetime.

When the premiums no longer affect your own personal risk, that's what makes you feel like you're getting ripped off. On the other end of the spectrum, if you're one of those uninsurables, smoothing health costs over time does jack shit, because no amount of smoothing will make you not financially screwed because costs are already too high.

What people want, is actually just affordable healthcare, and I think disentangling the system with the insurance model is the only way we will be able to accept the realities of having to pay for it all one way or another.

On February 09 2017 04:46 chocorush wrote:
On the insurance issues. What people think of as "insurance" isn't what they actually want. Insurance is a financial product meant to smooth costs over time (pay premiums + copay over a lifetime, rather than footing large spikes of medical costs). It's not meant to save you money, but make the spending manageable by spreading the total costs over your lifetime.

When the premiums no longer affect your own personal risk, that's what makes you feel like you're getting ripped off. On the other end of the spectrum, if you're one of those uninsurables, smoothing health costs over time does jack shit, because no amount of smoothing will make you not financially screwed because costs are already too high.

What people want, is actually just affordable healthcare, and I think disentangling the system with the insurance model is the only way we will be able to accept the realities of having to pay for it all one way or another.