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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On July 01 2017 06:01 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 02:33 Simberto wrote:On July 01 2017 02:22 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 01:58 Mercy13 wrote:On July 01 2017 01:26 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 01:13 TheTenthDoc wrote:On July 01 2017 01:10 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 00:53 farvacola wrote:
Yes, every plan proposed by Republicans is similarly terrible. "No matter what Republicans propose" is fatuous nonsense, to borrow a pedantic word. You don't find it even a little funny that a full repeal vs a very expensive Obamacare 2.0 gets the same coverage score? I don't even like the bill and was rolling my eyes. To play off your post, you don't have to act like a humorlous bore even if it's politics. Full repeal vs. replacement doesn't matter when they all delete the Medicaid insurance expansion in one way or another. Everything else is a drop in the bucket compared to that. If anything, this just shows that none of their "2.0s" are actually designed to increase coverage in a meaningful way. Which is almost certainly the case since the authors of these bills don't care about the coverage numbers at all. When you consider that health outcomes for people on Medicaid are provably no better than the uninsured, the value of coverage numbers related to expanded Medicaid coverage decays massively. And making insurance shittier for all makes nothing matter on a wide variety of fronts. Congratulations, you're covered, you don't qualify for subsidies, you're paying almost full price for your medication, and your plans more than twice as expensive with more than double the deductible! Join our statistic of coverage successes! If you're referring to the Oregon study, you have to wildly misinterpret it's results to reach that conclusion. Is the expansion the crucial measure saving millions from death? I wouldn't need to cite the study if the rhetoric wasn't already at the level of Medicaid expansion acting like the divine intervention of God. Those despicable individuals whose tweets several cited a few pages back remind me how detached the debate has become from solid grounding in the federal programs, the ACA changes, and the bills under consideration in the House (formerly) and Senate. Don't turn this around. You claimed that "health outcomes on Medicaid are provably no better than uninsured". People have asked you to back that claim up, which shouldn't be that hard if it is "provably" the case. So far, you have failed to show any proof of anything. And now you try to shift the discussion away from that subject. I had an assertion to the contrary thus far. One person wanted to shift to access, when I said health outcomes. If you want to read the study and ground your own personal objection rather than assertion, be my guest.
I would be reading that study instead of complaining about it if at any point you had posted it, or a link to it, or a name to it. So far, you haven't done any of that, despite being asked to by multiple people.
You just let people guess which study you mean, and than once they argued against it, you will claim that that was not actually the study you were talking about. That is not how good discussions work. If you claim that something is "provably so", you should be willing to actually provide that prove when prompted, instead of having people guess what you might be talking about.
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On July 01 2017 06:39 On_Slaught wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 06:03 Gorsameth wrote:On July 01 2017 05:38 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:So it was Kushner who tried to 'convince' the show hosts of apologizing to Trump by holding a tabloid story above their head. Such a nice family. *plays the godfather music* Some gut feeling tells me Trump might actually not have known about the blackmailing. If he wasn't then I doubt he will be happy to hear his son-in-law and senior adviser get into trouble for blackmail. Esp if there is hard proof (god I hope there is). Might have thought this until he tweeted about them calling asking him to kill the story. Makes no sense for him to say that if he knew nothing.
Trump is quick to jump on any story and claim credit without knowing a thing about what is going on. This wouldn't be the first time.
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On July 01 2017 06:41 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 06:06 Plansix wrote:On July 01 2017 06:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2017 05:49 semantics wrote:
More often than not legitimately small businesses that are run well are rare, it's hard for 1 person starting out to properly negotiate a commercial lease(yes you can negotiate terms not rent but a lot of other things), dealing with taxes, dealing with employee health insurance, let alone the basics of inventory and where you get your inventory, employing people and managing overhead; more often not they get tripped up by things they didn't expect. It's not required for you to actually be good at business to start a business. Sure, but how well someone is doing at something should certainly be considered when they say there is something they can't accommodate. When it comes to $15/hour, it is difficult to have sympathy for businesses that say they can't afford it, as if they can't for some divine reason. Just saying "I can't afford that" often makes people think the wage is the problem rather than the business. As a society, people often trust a small business owner when they say there's nothing they could do to accommodate a $15/hour wage. There is a society-wide, undue respect for small business owners as a whole. But what about the areas where it could end business built on a lower minimum wage? And there are no other jobs to replace those lost wages. In the abstract, it is easy to say “well that business wasn’t viable, so it shouldn’t exist”. But what about when there is nothing to takes its place? There are some businesses that can’t support those wages. If we insist that because a place was somewhere to live before, that it should be in perpetuity, economics be damned, then there are more effective welfare programs than ones that blindly subsidize businesses that can't support themselves and their employees.
Okay, but this seems rather contrary to your "minimum wage killing jobs is a myth" statement from before.
As I said in my first response, it's a matter of priorities and goals. Do you want to a living wage for those working, at the expense or increasing unemployment or loss of overall work hours, or do you want lower unemployment at the expense of people working below the poverty line?
Ideally the sweet spot of minimum wage to acceptable employment levels would be right at a living wage, but that relies on other social programs, or decreases in the cost of living.
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On July 01 2017 06:15 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 03:34 Mercy13 wrote:On July 01 2017 02:22 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 01:58 Mercy13 wrote:On July 01 2017 01:26 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 01:13 TheTenthDoc wrote:On July 01 2017 01:10 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 00:53 farvacola wrote:
Yes, every plan proposed by Republicans is similarly terrible. "No matter what Republicans propose" is fatuous nonsense, to borrow a pedantic word. You don't find it even a little funny that a full repeal vs a very expensive Obamacare 2.0 gets the same coverage score? I don't even like the bill and was rolling my eyes. To play off your post, you don't have to act like a humorlous bore even if it's politics. Full repeal vs. replacement doesn't matter when they all delete the Medicaid insurance expansion in one way or another. Everything else is a drop in the bucket compared to that. If anything, this just shows that none of their "2.0s" are actually designed to increase coverage in a meaningful way. Which is almost certainly the case since the authors of these bills don't care about the coverage numbers at all. When you consider that health outcomes for people on Medicaid are provably no better than the uninsured, the value of coverage numbers related to expanded Medicaid coverage decays massively. And making insurance shittier for all makes nothing matter on a wide variety of fronts. Congratulations, you're covered, you don't qualify for subsidies, you're paying almost full price for your medication, and your plans more than twice as expensive with more than double the deductible! Join our statistic of coverage successes! If you're referring to the Oregon study, you have to wildly misinterpret it's results to reach that conclusion. Is the expansion the crucial measure saving millions from death? I wouldn't need to cite the study if the rhetoric wasn't already at the level of Medicaid expansion acting like the divine intervention of God. Those despicable individuals whose tweets several cited a few pages back remind me how detached the debate has become from solid grounding in the federal programs, the ACA changes, and the bills under consideration in the House (formerly) and Senate. Are you referring to the Oregon study? If so I'm happy to cite it. It had it's limitations, but still reached some interesting conclusions: The Oregon Experiment — Effects of Medicaid on Clinical OutcomesMedicaid coverage did not have a significant effect on measures of blood pressure, cholesterol, or glycated hemoglobin. I assume this is what you're referring to when you say that access to Medicaid has been proven to not improve health outcomes. As you are probably well-aware, these three measures are not the only way to measure health outcomes. It should be noted that the sample size of the study was too small to look at morbidity or cancer treatment, among other things. The study did find that access to Medicaid increased the percentage of people who reported that their health had improved over the previous year, and reduced financial hardship from catastrophic medical expenses. Keeping in mind that this study had a small sample size and was limited to one state, it is totally reasonable to have a discussion around it about whether the amount we spend on Medicaid is worth the identified benefits. It would also be great to discuss improvements which can be made to Medicaid so that the treatments provided do a better job of treating blood pressure, cholesterol, etc. However the current debate isn't about the best way to provide healthcare to poor people. The current debate is over whether a tax cut for rich people should be paid for by taking health coverage away from millions of poor people. Conservatives supporting the healthcare bill (I know you're not in this group) don't give a shit about health outcomes. Oh, is that the status of the current debate? Tax cuts for rich people should be paid by taking away health coverage from millions of poor people? I almost took you seriously. But if that's your game, the current debate is on making healthy people the slaves of the poor and infirm, and crashing the insurance markets while trying to dodge the blame. If you want to up it to Warren/Clinton/Sanders heights, you can add on making forcing free citizens to pay for the massacre of innocent women and children. I'm a little tired of the policy as atrocity game, but if you want everyone to emerge callous and flip it around every time, you're doing an excellent job. I'd be happy to revisit and invest the time necessary into these long back and forths when Congress comes back from recess and the discourse is less reminiscent of Calling your political opponents kulaks. I'm already mad enough that I'll probably be forced to vote Trump again if this is the opposition's stance.
I'm genuinely confused about what you think the purpose of the bill is if not to cut taxes for rich people... Specifically the taxes in the ACA which were designed to pay for the Medicaid expansion exchange subsidies.
If they left those taxes in place there's all kinds of things they could do to reform the healthcare system in a more conservative direction that would arguably be better than the status quo. Unfortunately the goal of this effort appears to be to cut taxes, not to improve or even reform the healthcare system in a conservative direction. It's keeping the basic structure of the ACA in place, while removing hundreds of billions of dollars from the system.
I don't see how anyone could argue in good faith that this approach will lead to improvements over the status quo.
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United States42021 Posts
On July 01 2017 05:55 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 05:49 semantics wrote:
More often than not legitimately small businesses that are run well are rare, it's hard for 1 person starting out to properly negotiate a commercial lease(yes you can negotiate terms not rent but a lot of other things), dealing with taxes, dealing with employee health insurance, let alone the basics of inventory and where you get your inventory, employing people and managing overhead; more often not they get tripped up by things they didn't expect. It's not required for you to actually be good at business to start a business. I don't think Kwark's business is that "small" and iirc it was wasting money like a rapper at a strip club.
"creating jobs for hard working Americans"
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On July 01 2017 06:15 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 03:34 Mercy13 wrote:On July 01 2017 02:22 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 01:58 Mercy13 wrote:On July 01 2017 01:26 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 01:13 TheTenthDoc wrote:On July 01 2017 01:10 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 00:53 farvacola wrote:
Yes, every plan proposed by Republicans is similarly terrible. "No matter what Republicans propose" is fatuous nonsense, to borrow a pedantic word. You don't find it even a little funny that a full repeal vs a very expensive Obamacare 2.0 gets the same coverage score? I don't even like the bill and was rolling my eyes. To play off your post, you don't have to act like a humorlous bore even if it's politics. Full repeal vs. replacement doesn't matter when they all delete the Medicaid insurance expansion in one way or another. Everything else is a drop in the bucket compared to that. If anything, this just shows that none of their "2.0s" are actually designed to increase coverage in a meaningful way. Which is almost certainly the case since the authors of these bills don't care about the coverage numbers at all. When you consider that health outcomes for people on Medicaid are provably no better than the uninsured, the value of coverage numbers related to expanded Medicaid coverage decays massively. And making insurance shittier for all makes nothing matter on a wide variety of fronts. Congratulations, you're covered, you don't qualify for subsidies, you're paying almost full price for your medication, and your plans more than twice as expensive with more than double the deductible! Join our statistic of coverage successes! If you're referring to the Oregon study, you have to wildly misinterpret it's results to reach that conclusion. Is the expansion the crucial measure saving millions from death? I wouldn't need to cite the study if the rhetoric wasn't already at the level of Medicaid expansion acting like the divine intervention of God. Those despicable individuals whose tweets several cited a few pages back remind me how detached the debate has become from solid grounding in the federal programs, the ACA changes, and the bills under consideration in the House (formerly) and Senate. Are you referring to the Oregon study? If so I'm happy to cite it. It had it's limitations, but still reached some interesting conclusions: The Oregon Experiment — Effects of Medicaid on Clinical OutcomesMedicaid coverage did not have a significant effect on measures of blood pressure, cholesterol, or glycated hemoglobin. I assume this is what you're referring to when you say that access to Medicaid has been proven to not improve health outcomes. As you are probably well-aware, these three measures are not the only way to measure health outcomes. It should be noted that the sample size of the study was too small to look at morbidity or cancer treatment, among other things. The study did find that access to Medicaid increased the percentage of people who reported that their health had improved over the previous year, and reduced financial hardship from catastrophic medical expenses. Keeping in mind that this study had a small sample size and was limited to one state, it is totally reasonable to have a discussion around it about whether the amount we spend on Medicaid is worth the identified benefits. It would also be great to discuss improvements which can be made to Medicaid so that the treatments provided do a better job of treating blood pressure, cholesterol, etc. However the current debate isn't about the best way to provide healthcare to poor people. The current debate is over whether a tax cut for rich people should be paid for by taking health coverage away from millions of poor people. Conservatives supporting the healthcare bill (I know you're not in this group) don't give a shit about health outcomes. Oh, is that the status of the current debate? Tax cuts for rich people should be paid by taking away health coverage from millions of poor people? I almost took you seriously. But if that's your game, the current debate is on making healthy people the slaves of the poor and infirm, and crashing the insurance markets while trying to dodge the blame. If you want to up it to Warren/Clinton/Sanders heights, you can add on making forcing free citizens to pay for the massacre of innocent women and children. I'm a little tired of the policy as atrocity game, but if you want everyone to emerge callous and flip it around every time, you're doing an excellent job. I'd be happy to revisit and invest the time necessary into these long back and forths when Congress comes back from recess and the discourse is less reminiscent of Calling your political opponents kulaks. I'm already mad enough that I'll probably be forced to vote Trump again if this is the opposition's stance.
where the fuck are you getting your facts?
the ACA included tax hikes on investment income and payroll for individuals (or households i forget) making 250k a year for both the ACA and medicare, a tax on cadillac plans (which are the ones rich people get). these are part of what's getting cut from the bill under consideration, which also removes the tax deductions on medical care for insurance execs making 500k among other things.
it is not inaccurate to say that wealthier americans are getting a tax cut at the expense of poorer ones at all.
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On July 01 2017 06:39 Mohdoo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 06:01 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 02:33 Simberto wrote:On July 01 2017 02:22 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 01:58 Mercy13 wrote:On July 01 2017 01:26 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 01:13 TheTenthDoc wrote:On July 01 2017 01:10 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 00:53 farvacola wrote:
Yes, every plan proposed by Republicans is similarly terrible. "No matter what Republicans propose" is fatuous nonsense, to borrow a pedantic word. You don't find it even a little funny that a full repeal vs a very expensive Obamacare 2.0 gets the same coverage score? I don't even like the bill and was rolling my eyes. To play off your post, you don't have to act like a humorlous bore even if it's politics. Full repeal vs. replacement doesn't matter when they all delete the Medicaid insurance expansion in one way or another. Everything else is a drop in the bucket compared to that. If anything, this just shows that none of their "2.0s" are actually designed to increase coverage in a meaningful way. Which is almost certainly the case since the authors of these bills don't care about the coverage numbers at all. When you consider that health outcomes for people on Medicaid are provably no better than the uninsured, the value of coverage numbers related to expanded Medicaid coverage decays massively. And making insurance shittier for all makes nothing matter on a wide variety of fronts. Congratulations, you're covered, you don't qualify for subsidies, you're paying almost full price for your medication, and your plans more than twice as expensive with more than double the deductible! Join our statistic of coverage successes! If you're referring to the Oregon study, you have to wildly misinterpret it's results to reach that conclusion. Is the expansion the crucial measure saving millions from death? I wouldn't need to cite the study if the rhetoric wasn't already at the level of Medicaid expansion acting like the divine intervention of God. Those despicable individuals whose tweets several cited a few pages back remind me how detached the debate has become from solid grounding in the federal programs, the ACA changes, and the bills under consideration in the House (formerly) and Senate. Don't turn this around. You claimed that "health outcomes on Medicaid are provably no better than uninsured". People have asked you to back that claim up, which shouldn't be that hard if it is "provably" the case. So far, you have failed to show any proof of anything. And now you try to shift the discussion away from that subject. I had an assertion to the contrary thus far. One person wanted to shift to access, when I said health outcomes. If you want to read the study and ground your own personal objection rather than assertion, be my guest. There's also the fact that the study in question does not exactly account for everything. The big, big, big issue is the fact that people without insurance are hesitant to get care. I feel cheesy "playing this card", but my father in law ended up passing away from a treatable form of cancer because he didn't want to incur the huge cost of going to the doctor. Did he have every opportunity to get care? Absolutely. But this is sadly very common. People being afraid of the cost of care, then dying because of it, when the whole thing could have been prevented, is an enormous cost to not just a family but society as a whole. Healthcare costs as a whole are larger when someone dies of cancer rather than being treated for cancer. Do you not see this dynamic as an issue? I am certain I am not the only one who knows someone who didn't want to incur medical costs and got severely burned for it.
I see the high costs as a very important dynamic, one unfixed by shoving taxpayer money into subsidies until kingdom come. Let's talk about showing consumers what different hospitals will charge and move the tax system to an individual-focused and not employer-focused. Let's talk insurance as a means to manage risk of sudden catastrophes and expensive long-term treatments and not pre-pay buffet. Yes, let's even put universal catastrophic on the table along with welfare program reform for the poor, severely handicapped, orphans and widows. Let's talk about the cost to the taxpayer as funder and the choice the taxpayer can make as a free individual purchasing for himself/family. I see these all particularly unaddressed by Medicaid chants, murder assertions, previously rape-as-preexisting-condition accusations. I linger back and forth between this being an unapproachable poisoned debate and productive discourse at the margins (because some of this will be ideologically motivated by the normal nanny-state division).
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On July 01 2017 06:55 WolfintheSheep wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 06:41 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 01 2017 06:06 Plansix wrote:On July 01 2017 06:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2017 05:49 semantics wrote:
More often than not legitimately small businesses that are run well are rare, it's hard for 1 person starting out to properly negotiate a commercial lease(yes you can negotiate terms not rent but a lot of other things), dealing with taxes, dealing with employee health insurance, let alone the basics of inventory and where you get your inventory, employing people and managing overhead; more often not they get tripped up by things they didn't expect. It's not required for you to actually be good at business to start a business. Sure, but how well someone is doing at something should certainly be considered when they say there is something they can't accommodate. When it comes to $15/hour, it is difficult to have sympathy for businesses that say they can't afford it, as if they can't for some divine reason. Just saying "I can't afford that" often makes people think the wage is the problem rather than the business. As a society, people often trust a small business owner when they say there's nothing they could do to accommodate a $15/hour wage. There is a society-wide, undue respect for small business owners as a whole. But what about the areas where it could end business built on a lower minimum wage? And there are no other jobs to replace those lost wages. In the abstract, it is easy to say “well that business wasn’t viable, so it shouldn’t exist”. But what about when there is nothing to takes its place? There are some businesses that can’t support those wages. If we insist that because a place was somewhere to live before, that it should be in perpetuity, economics be damned, then there are more effective welfare programs than ones that blindly subsidize businesses that can't support themselves and their employees. Okay, but this seems rather contrary to your "minimum wage killing jobs is a myth" statement from before. As I said in my first response, it's a matter of priorities and goals. Do you want to a living wage for those working, at the expense or increasing unemployment or loss of overall work hours, or do you want lower unemployment at the expense of people working below the poverty line? Ideally the sweet spot of minimum wage to acceptable employment levels would be right at a living wage, but that relies on other social programs, or decreases in the cost of living.
Minimum wage isn't killing those jobs, the fact that they aren't economically and socially sustainable killed them long ago, they've just been living off of federal subsidies sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, by supporting the people they don't pay enough.
EDIT: I'm saying we can come up with more effective solutions if the idea is to keep people believing they are being productive in a town that may no longer be economically sustainable without federal and state welfare into the community disproportionate to their contributions.
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Look everyone, Danglars is neither agreeing nor disagreeing with what you're saying the health care changes will result in.
He doesn't like the language you are using to describe those changes, and would like you to frame it in vocabulary that will appeal to his sensibilities.
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On July 01 2017 06:41 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 06:06 Plansix wrote:On July 01 2017 06:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2017 05:49 semantics wrote:
More often than not legitimately small businesses that are run well are rare, it's hard for 1 person starting out to properly negotiate a commercial lease(yes you can negotiate terms not rent but a lot of other things), dealing with taxes, dealing with employee health insurance, let alone the basics of inventory and where you get your inventory, employing people and managing overhead; more often not they get tripped up by things they didn't expect. It's not required for you to actually be good at business to start a business. Sure, but how well someone is doing at something should certainly be considered when they say there is something they can't accommodate. When it comes to $15/hour, it is difficult to have sympathy for businesses that say they can't afford it, as if they can't for some divine reason. Just saying "I can't afford that" often makes people think the wage is the problem rather than the business. As a society, people often trust a small business owner when they say there's nothing they could do to accommodate a $15/hour wage. There is a society-wide, undue respect for small business owners as a whole. But what about the areas where it could end business built on a lower minimum wage? And there are no other jobs to replace those lost wages. In the abstract, it is easy to say “well that business wasn’t viable, so it shouldn’t exist”. But what about when there is nothing to takes its place? There are some businesses that can’t support those wages. If we insist that because a place was somewhere to live before, that it should be in perpetuity, economics be damned, then there are more effective welfare programs than ones that blindly subsidize businesses that can't support themselves and their employees.
I'm not sure that is going to convince my home town that everyone needs to make $15 an hour. Or the entire western part of my state.
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On July 01 2017 07:03 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 06:39 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2017 06:01 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 02:33 Simberto wrote:On July 01 2017 02:22 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 01:58 Mercy13 wrote:On July 01 2017 01:26 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 01:13 TheTenthDoc wrote:On July 01 2017 01:10 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 00:53 farvacola wrote:
Yes, every plan proposed by Republicans is similarly terrible. "No matter what Republicans propose" is fatuous nonsense, to borrow a pedantic word. You don't find it even a little funny that a full repeal vs a very expensive Obamacare 2.0 gets the same coverage score? I don't even like the bill and was rolling my eyes. To play off your post, you don't have to act like a humorlous bore even if it's politics. Full repeal vs. replacement doesn't matter when they all delete the Medicaid insurance expansion in one way or another. Everything else is a drop in the bucket compared to that. If anything, this just shows that none of their "2.0s" are actually designed to increase coverage in a meaningful way. Which is almost certainly the case since the authors of these bills don't care about the coverage numbers at all. When you consider that health outcomes for people on Medicaid are provably no better than the uninsured, the value of coverage numbers related to expanded Medicaid coverage decays massively. And making insurance shittier for all makes nothing matter on a wide variety of fronts. Congratulations, you're covered, you don't qualify for subsidies, you're paying almost full price for your medication, and your plans more than twice as expensive with more than double the deductible! Join our statistic of coverage successes! If you're referring to the Oregon study, you have to wildly misinterpret it's results to reach that conclusion. Is the expansion the crucial measure saving millions from death? I wouldn't need to cite the study if the rhetoric wasn't already at the level of Medicaid expansion acting like the divine intervention of God. Those despicable individuals whose tweets several cited a few pages back remind me how detached the debate has become from solid grounding in the federal programs, the ACA changes, and the bills under consideration in the House (formerly) and Senate. Don't turn this around. You claimed that "health outcomes on Medicaid are provably no better than uninsured". People have asked you to back that claim up, which shouldn't be that hard if it is "provably" the case. So far, you have failed to show any proof of anything. And now you try to shift the discussion away from that subject. I had an assertion to the contrary thus far. One person wanted to shift to access, when I said health outcomes. If you want to read the study and ground your own personal objection rather than assertion, be my guest. There's also the fact that the study in question does not exactly account for everything. The big, big, big issue is the fact that people without insurance are hesitant to get care. I feel cheesy "playing this card", but my father in law ended up passing away from a treatable form of cancer because he didn't want to incur the huge cost of going to the doctor. Did he have every opportunity to get care? Absolutely. But this is sadly very common. People being afraid of the cost of care, then dying because of it, when the whole thing could have been prevented, is an enormous cost to not just a family but society as a whole. Healthcare costs as a whole are larger when someone dies of cancer rather than being treated for cancer. Do you not see this dynamic as an issue? I am certain I am not the only one who knows someone who didn't want to incur medical costs and got severely burned for it. I see the high costs as a very important dynamic, one unfixed by shoving taxpayer money into subsidies until kingdom come. Let's talk about showing consumers what different hospitals will charge and move the tax system to an individual-focused and not employer-focused. Let's talk insurance as a means to manage risk of sudden catastrophes and expensive long-term treatments and not pre-pay buffet. Yes, let's even put universal catastrophic on the table along with welfare program reform for the poor, severely handicapped, orphans and widows. Let's talk about the cost to the taxpayer as funder and the choice the taxpayer can make as a free individual purchasing for himself/family. I see these all particularly unaddressed by Medicaid chants, murder assertions, previously rape-as-preexisting-condition accusations. I linger back and forth between this being an unapproachable poisoned debate and productive discourse at the margins (because some of this will be ideologically motivated by the normal nanny-state division).
This feels more like a soapbox speech than a conversation. What do you think should be done so that poor people aren't afraid to incur medical costs?
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On July 01 2017 07:06 WolfintheSheep wrote:
Look everyone, Danglars is neither agreeing nor disagreeing with what you're saying the health care changes will result in.
He doesn't like the language you are using to describe those changes, and would like you to frame it in vocabulary that will appeal to his sensibilities.
I just need to know what adjectives he prefers we use when discussing the bill. We should be respectful progressives, just like when we ask people what pro-noun they prefer.
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On July 01 2017 07:07 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 06:41 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 01 2017 06:06 Plansix wrote:On July 01 2017 06:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2017 05:49 semantics wrote:
More often than not legitimately small businesses that are run well are rare, it's hard for 1 person starting out to properly negotiate a commercial lease(yes you can negotiate terms not rent but a lot of other things), dealing with taxes, dealing with employee health insurance, let alone the basics of inventory and where you get your inventory, employing people and managing overhead; more often not they get tripped up by things they didn't expect. It's not required for you to actually be good at business to start a business. Sure, but how well someone is doing at something should certainly be considered when they say there is something they can't accommodate. When it comes to $15/hour, it is difficult to have sympathy for businesses that say they can't afford it, as if they can't for some divine reason. Just saying "I can't afford that" often makes people think the wage is the problem rather than the business. As a society, people often trust a small business owner when they say there's nothing they could do to accommodate a $15/hour wage. There is a society-wide, undue respect for small business owners as a whole. But what about the areas where it could end business built on a lower minimum wage? And there are no other jobs to replace those lost wages. In the abstract, it is easy to say “well that business wasn’t viable, so it shouldn’t exist”. But what about when there is nothing to takes its place? There are some businesses that can’t support those wages. If we insist that because a place was somewhere to live before, that it should be in perpetuity, economics be damned, then there are more effective welfare programs than ones that blindly subsidize businesses that can't support themselves and their employees. I'm not sure that is going to convince my home town that everyone needs to make $15 an hour. Or the entire western part of my state.
Maybe your hometown isn't economically relevant and needs to make some choices. For instance, it might be more in their best interest to support a UBI instead of a higher minimum wage or obsolescence.
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On July 01 2017 07:09 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 07:07 Plansix wrote:On July 01 2017 06:41 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 01 2017 06:06 Plansix wrote:On July 01 2017 06:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2017 05:49 semantics wrote:
More often than not legitimately small businesses that are run well are rare, it's hard for 1 person starting out to properly negotiate a commercial lease(yes you can negotiate terms not rent but a lot of other things), dealing with taxes, dealing with employee health insurance, let alone the basics of inventory and where you get your inventory, employing people and managing overhead; more often not they get tripped up by things they didn't expect. It's not required for you to actually be good at business to start a business. Sure, but how well someone is doing at something should certainly be considered when they say there is something they can't accommodate. When it comes to $15/hour, it is difficult to have sympathy for businesses that say they can't afford it, as if they can't for some divine reason. Just saying "I can't afford that" often makes people think the wage is the problem rather than the business. As a society, people often trust a small business owner when they say there's nothing they could do to accommodate a $15/hour wage. There is a society-wide, undue respect for small business owners as a whole. But what about the areas where it could end business built on a lower minimum wage? And there are no other jobs to replace those lost wages. In the abstract, it is easy to say “well that business wasn’t viable, so it shouldn’t exist”. But what about when there is nothing to takes its place? There are some businesses that can’t support those wages. If we insist that because a place was somewhere to live before, that it should be in perpetuity, economics be damned, then there are more effective welfare programs than ones that blindly subsidize businesses that can't support themselves and their employees. I'm not sure that is going to convince my home town that everyone needs to make $15 an hour. Or the entire western part of my state. Maybe your hometown isn't economically relevant and needs to make some choices. For instance, it might be more in their best interest to support a UBI instead of a higher minimum wage or obsolescence.
So you're not disagreeing that jobs are lost anymore, and that on average workers (as a whole), lost money.
You're just arguing if it's bad or good now?
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On July 01 2017 07:09 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 07:07 Plansix wrote:On July 01 2017 06:41 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 01 2017 06:06 Plansix wrote:On July 01 2017 06:00 Mohdoo wrote:On July 01 2017 05:49 semantics wrote:
More often than not legitimately small businesses that are run well are rare, it's hard for 1 person starting out to properly negotiate a commercial lease(yes you can negotiate terms not rent but a lot of other things), dealing with taxes, dealing with employee health insurance, let alone the basics of inventory and where you get your inventory, employing people and managing overhead; more often not they get tripped up by things they didn't expect. It's not required for you to actually be good at business to start a business. Sure, but how well someone is doing at something should certainly be considered when they say there is something they can't accommodate. When it comes to $15/hour, it is difficult to have sympathy for businesses that say they can't afford it, as if they can't for some divine reason. Just saying "I can't afford that" often makes people think the wage is the problem rather than the business. As a society, people often trust a small business owner when they say there's nothing they could do to accommodate a $15/hour wage. There is a society-wide, undue respect for small business owners as a whole. But what about the areas where it could end business built on a lower minimum wage? And there are no other jobs to replace those lost wages. In the abstract, it is easy to say “well that business wasn’t viable, so it shouldn’t exist”. But what about when there is nothing to takes its place? There are some businesses that can’t support those wages. If we insist that because a place was somewhere to live before, that it should be in perpetuity, economics be damned, then there are more effective welfare programs than ones that blindly subsidize businesses that can't support themselves and their employees. I'm not sure that is going to convince my home town that everyone needs to make $15 an hour. Or the entire western part of my state. Maybe your hometown isn't economically relevant and needs to make some choices. For instance, it might be more in their best interest to support a UBI instead of a higher minimum wage or obsolescence.
UBI is going to translate into welfare, just like the poors. They are hardworking people that the goverment and world is keeping down. They don't accept hand outs or socialism. You are better off shooting for $15 minimum wage and telling them their town needs to die for progress.
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Cost of living, and therefore a living wage, is much lower in small towns than it is in the handful of megacities whose residents tend to favor a high minimum wage.
A $15 minimum wage would be absurd in some towns; I know of several where the managers don't make that much. On the other hand, they're still economically relevant, in large part because they can have a low cost of labor without dropping standards of living.
Hiking the minimum wage nationwide is telling most of the country's midsized towns and several whole states that the big cities are determined to take away all their jobs.
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yep, $15 is too high. i'd like to see something like a min wage tied to COL/ inflation measure, but seems like that sort of calculation would be subject to a lot of gaming/ adjustments which different states/ areas would react badly to.
there are a lot of pretty big cities where $15 would be pretty decent living too.
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On July 01 2017 07:14 Buckyman wrote:
Cost of living, and therefore a living wage, is much lower in small towns than it is in the handful of megacities whose residents tend to favor a high minimum wage.
A $15 minimum wage would be absurd in some towns; I know of several where the managers don't make that much. On the other hand, they're still economically relevant, in large part because they can have a low cost of labor without dropping standards of living.
Hiking the minimum wage nationwide is telling most of the country's midsized towns and several whole states that the big cities are determined to take away all their jobs.
The minimum wage needs to increase, but we need a better system to determine it. Rather than a number picked out of thin air. We cannot continue on the path of ignoring it, since inflation exists. Better social services and lowing the cost of living in cities is a more viable solution for goverment.
On July 01 2017 07:17 ticklishmusic wrote:
yep, $15 is too high. i'd like to see something like a min wage tied to COL/ inflation measure, but seems like that sort of calculation would be subject to a lot of gaming/ adjustments which different states/ areas would react badly to.
there are a lot of pretty big cities where $15 would be pretty decent living too.
I will say that Boston and NYC are not those places. I'm sure DC and the surrounding area are also bad. A $11 min-wage wage in Boston should come with the congress members spitting on you.
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On July 01 2017 07:14 Buckyman wrote:
Cost of living, and therefore a living wage, is much lower in small towns than it is in the handful of megacities whose residents tend to favor a high minimum wage.
A $15 minimum wage would be absurd in some towns; I know of several where the managers don't make that much. On the other hand, they're still economically relevant, in large part because they can have a low cost of labor without dropping standards of living.
Hiking the minimum wage nationwide is telling most of the country's midsized towns and several whole states that the big cities are determined to take away all their jobs.
That's because the managers are underpaid. And being a "manager" is not exactly some kind of accomplishment. It is still unskilled labor with slightly more responsibility. It is more so someone doing a different job than actually doing something elevated. This is all assuming you're talking about someone working at a restaurant/bank/store.
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On July 01 2017 06:55 Mercy13 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2017 06:15 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 03:34 Mercy13 wrote:On July 01 2017 02:22 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 01:58 Mercy13 wrote:On July 01 2017 01:26 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 01:13 TheTenthDoc wrote:On July 01 2017 01:10 Danglars wrote:On July 01 2017 00:53 farvacola wrote:
Yes, every plan proposed by Republicans is similarly terrible. "No matter what Republicans propose" is fatuous nonsense, to borrow a pedantic word. You don't find it even a little funny that a full repeal vs a very expensive Obamacare 2.0 gets the same coverage score? I don't even like the bill and was rolling my eyes. To play off your post, you don't have to act like a humorlous bore even if it's politics. Full repeal vs. replacement doesn't matter when they all delete the Medicaid insurance expansion in one way or another. Everything else is a drop in the bucket compared to that. If anything, this just shows that none of their "2.0s" are actually designed to increase coverage in a meaningful way. Which is almost certainly the case since the authors of these bills don't care about the coverage numbers at all. When you consider that health outcomes for people on Medicaid are provably no better than the uninsured, the value of coverage numbers related to expanded Medicaid coverage decays massively. And making insurance shittier for all makes nothing matter on a wide variety of fronts. Congratulations, you're covered, you don't qualify for subsidies, you're paying almost full price for your medication, and your plans more than twice as expensive with more than double the deductible! Join our statistic of coverage successes! If you're referring to the Oregon study, you have to wildly misinterpret it's results to reach that conclusion. Is the expansion the crucial measure saving millions from death? I wouldn't need to cite the study if the rhetoric wasn't already at the level of Medicaid expansion acting like the divine intervention of God. Those despicable individuals whose tweets several cited a few pages back remind me how detached the debate has become from solid grounding in the federal programs, the ACA changes, and the bills under consideration in the House (formerly) and Senate. Are you referring to the Oregon study? If so I'm happy to cite it. It had it's limitations, but still reached some interesting conclusions: The Oregon Experiment — Effects of Medicaid on Clinical OutcomesMedicaid coverage did not have a significant effect on measures of blood pressure, cholesterol, or glycated hemoglobin. I assume this is what you're referring to when you say that access to Medicaid has been proven to not improve health outcomes. As you are probably well-aware, these three measures are not the only way to measure health outcomes. It should be noted that the sample size of the study was too small to look at morbidity or cancer treatment, among other things. The study did find that access to Medicaid increased the percentage of people who reported that their health had improved over the previous year, and reduced financial hardship from catastrophic medical expenses. Keeping in mind that this study had a small sample size and was limited to one state, it is totally reasonable to have a discussion around it about whether the amount we spend on Medicaid is worth the identified benefits. It would also be great to discuss improvements which can be made to Medicaid so that the treatments provided do a better job of treating blood pressure, cholesterol, etc. However the current debate isn't about the best way to provide healthcare to poor people. The current debate is over whether a tax cut for rich people should be paid for by taking health coverage away from millions of poor people. Conservatives supporting the healthcare bill (I know you're not in this group) don't give a shit about health outcomes. Oh, is that the status of the current debate? Tax cuts for rich people should be paid by taking away health coverage from millions of poor people? I almost took you seriously. But if that's your game, the current debate is on making healthy people the slaves of the poor and infirm, and crashing the insurance markets while trying to dodge the blame. If you want to up it to Warren/Clinton/Sanders heights, you can add on making forcing free citizens to pay for the massacre of innocent women and children. I'm a little tired of the policy as atrocity game, but if you want everyone to emerge callous and flip it around every time, you're doing an excellent job. I'd be happy to revisit and invest the time necessary into these long back and forths when Congress comes back from recess and the discourse is less reminiscent of Calling your political opponents kulaks. I'm already mad enough that I'll probably be forced to vote Trump again if this is the opposition's stance. I'm genuinely confused about what you think the purpose of the bill is if not to cut taxes for rich people... Specifically the taxes in the ACA which were designed to pay for the Medicaid expansion exchange subsidies. If they left those taxes in place there's all kinds of things they could do to reform the healthcare system in a more conservative direction that would arguably be better than the status quo. Unfortunately the goal of this effort appears to be to cut taxes, not to improve or even reform the healthcare system in a conservative direction. It's keeping the basic structure of the ACA in place, while removing hundreds of billions of dollars from the system. I don't see how anyone could argue in good faith that this approach will lead to improvements over the status quo.
Color me confused that you can call your approach genuine. I'm genuinely impressed ACA wants to wealth transfer from healthy to sick and poor, Senate wants to fund from more deficit spending. It fixes nothing and does a lot of kicking the can to the states. Obamacare needs a fix to put a stop to millions of Americans that cannot afford (and forbidden to purchase) health insurance that works for their families. It's got very little support.
Status quo is simply untenable.
+ Show Spoiler +
Bankrupting the country is also not the way out. Entitlement spending left unfixed consumes the federal budget in timespans that make climate alarmists do a double take. But I mean if you're all about status quo and fixes to a bill that broke the system are just cover for policies that benefit the 1%, we should probably just repeal it now and replace with jack shit because the debates over.
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