Yep, summed up nicely...Originally Posted by vegas1369
I'm literally looking at land in northern AZ and learning how to live off the grid. Figure it's going to be a lot more peaceful in the backwoods.
Yep, summed up nicely...
I'm literally looking at land in northern AZ and learning how to live off the grid. Figure it's going to be a lot more peaceful in the backwoods.
Yep, summed up nicely...
I'm literally looking at land in northern AZ and learning how to live off the grid. Figure it's going to be a lot more peaceful in the backwoods.
At this point if I thought I could maintain the type of life I want to live while being away from the general public, I'd probably be down with that too. Hopefully someday.
but the crazies on the left don't bother you, so you throw your vote for socialism
how can you tell when Obama is lying
Half a million Californians could lose their health care under Obamacare next year
Posted on October 25, 2013
http://blog.sfgate.com/djsaunders/20...are-next-year/
imo we should throw all the bums out and have term limits
Last edited by Rollo Tomasi; 10-28-2013 at 04:22 AM.
What the fuck does all that have to do whether I'm happy with Canadian healthcare?
Nothing, and Canadian healthcare is far superior to US health care for 99.9% of the population. The only place we excel is on the extremes. All the stories of wealthy sheiks and rich Europeans coming to the US for a procedure deals with that .01% of physicians, and not a one of those guys takes even a dollar of insurance. You can have the Rolls Royce policy of policies, and they don't give a fuck. They have no reason to even bother with insurance. They could put their office in the middle of Compton, and there will still be a line of limos around the block, because if you're sick, and they're the best, you'll pay, and go wherever. They laugh at the mention of insurance. They may order a diagnostic test that any doctor would, and insurance will cover that, but as far as paying them, forget about it. And the only advantage I have in seeing that guy over a Canadian is my airfare might be a bit cheaper, and I don't have to go through customs. Nothing else.
We overrate a ton of shit in America, but nothing as much as our healthcare. There is nothing more arrogant, and mediocre, than a specialist in some Newsweek top 20 American hospital. I was at John Hopkins, MD Andersen, consulted with a guy from Mayo, and not one of those fuckers had a clue. There was like 3 experts in the US that had a clue. Those are the guys foreigners are coming to see, and insurance isn't even in the conversation.
We get our ass kicked in the hard sciences by every industrialized country in the world. Even if you filter out our black and Hispanic inner-city kids, and just go white kid American vs. white kid European, or white kid American vs. Asian, they kick our ass, and it isn't even close. Yet we think we have some exceptional health care system. Delusion at it's finest. I used to think it also. It's indoctrinated into us, and then you get sick, and realize how incredibly average our system is, and what is great, you're paying out of pocket for.
We have some great schools, and we retain some of the students from an India, or some other shithole country, but we don't retain any Euros or first world Asians. Go try to find a Japanese, or insert any EU country, specialist practicing here. Even if educated here, they go home. If you do find one, they're either the very best, or the worst. So we are supposed to believe all these kids kicking our asses in the hard sciences their entire lives are worse doctors, and American health care is great? lol
You know what the worst major city in the industrialized world is if you get into a serious car accident, or have a real serious heart attack? Las Vegas. No level-1 trauma center in the entire town. Closest is LA. In my shitty steel town of less than 100k, we have a level 1 facility. In Pittsburgh, we had 4 within 10 minutes of me. If something goes south in Vegas, you're fucked. You are way, way better off to be in Bangkok over Las Vegas assuming you don't die in transit to a cacophony of moped horns.
Saying we're the best in health care is a lot like saying American poker players are the best. It's partially true given we might have 7 of the top 10 cash game players in the world, but if you have to give your entire bankroll to a random person you know nothing about, and the only information provided is country of origin, you would be a fucking idiot if you gave your money to an American. Our window-licker to genius ratio per capita is way worse than if you handed your money to a German or Scandi. Our healthcare is much the same. We have many of the very best, but our median is below average among first world countries.
Wait times, the expense of it, the practicality of it in a country our size, etc. are all legitimate concerns. That our already mediocre health care may be on the same level as Canada's is something we could only hope for.
SNL copyright nazis killed yet another viral YouTube of their show.
You'd think they would realize that this would only help their ratings, but the morons can't bitch to YouTube fast enough.
Here is a new version, likely to also go down very soon:
I sort of agree, and sort of disagree.
Nothing, and Canadian healthcare is far superior to US health care for 99.9% of the population. The only place we excel is on the extremes. All the stories of wealthy sheiks and rich Europeans coming to the US for a procedure deals with that .01% of physicians, and not a one of those guys takes even a dollar of insurance. You can have the Rolls Royce policy of policies, and they don't give a fuck. They have no reason to even bother with insurance. They could put their office in the middle of Compton, and there will still be a line of limos around the block, because if you're sick, and they're the best, you'll pay, and go wherever. They laugh at the mention of insurance. They may order a diagnostic test that any doctor would, and insurance will cover that, but as far as paying them, forget about it. And the only advantage I have in seeing that guy over a Canadian is my airfare might be a bit cheaper, and I don't have to go through customs. Nothing else.
We overrate a ton of shit in America, but nothing as much as our healthcare. There is nothing more arrogant, and mediocre, than a specialist in some Newsweek top 20 American hospital. I was at John Hopkins, MD Andersen, consulted with a guy from Mayo, and not one of those fuckers had a clue. There was like 3 experts in the US that had a clue. Those are the guys foreigners are coming to see, and insurance isn't even in the conversation.
We get our ass kicked in the hard sciences by every industrialized country in the world. Even if you filter out our black and Hispanic inner-city kids, and just go white kid American vs. white kid European, or white kid American vs. Asian, they kick our ass, and it isn't even close. Yet we think we have some exceptional health care system. Delusion at it's finest. I used to think it also. It's indoctrinated into us, and then you get sick, and realize how incredibly average our system is, and what is great, you're paying out of pocket for.
We have some great schools, and we retain some of the students from an India, or some other shithole country, but we don't retain any Euros or first world Asians. Go try to find a Japanese, or insert any EU country, specialist practicing here. Even if educated here, they go home. If you do find one, they're either the very best, or the worst. So we are supposed to believe all these kids kicking our asses in the hard sciences their entire lives are worse doctors, and American health care is great? lol
You know what the worst major city in the industrialized world is if you get into a serious car accident, or have a real serious heart attack? Las Vegas. No level-1 trauma center in the entire town. Closest is LA. In my shitty steel town of less than 100k, we have a level 1 facility. In Pittsburgh, we had 4 within 10 minutes of me. If something goes south in Vegas, you're fucked. You are way, way better off to be in Bangkok over Las Vegas assuming you don't die in transit to a cacophony of moped horns.
Saying we're the best in health care is a lot like saying American poker players are the best. It's partially true given we might have 7 of the top 10 cash game players in the world, but if you have to give your entire bankroll to a random person you know nothing about, and the only information provided is country of origin, you would be a fucking idiot if you gave your money to an American. Our window-licker to genius ratio per capita is way worse than if you handed your money to a German or Scandi. Our healthcare is much the same. We have many of the very best, but our median is below average among first world countries.
Wait times, the expense of it, the practicality of it in a country our size, etc. are all legitimate concerns. That our already mediocre health care may be on the same level as Canada's is something we could only hope for.
Your post seems to imply that your choice in the US is between great doctors who don't take insurance and mediocre doctors that do.
That's not accurate. There is a lot of in between.
Think of it like the WSOP Main Event.
My dad once asked me why I was spending $10,000 to play against 7,000 great tournament pros.
I explained to him that the Main is different. There are some great players, some good, some okay, and some bad. "With 7,000 players in one live tournament, it's impossible for them to all be good," I explained.
Same thing with the US. It's a big country. There are a lot of doctors. Of course you are going to have a wide range of skill levels. Where I agree with you is that there's a large group of mediocre ones, but you have a choice (especially if you're on a PPO). If you visit a doctor who isn't good, you can typically go elsewhere, unless you live in a small, isolated town, or unless you are in need of an unusual specialty. My approach to health care has typically been picking one at random (reviews aren't numerous enough to judge much), seeing how I like him/her, and going elsewhere if I'm unhappy. Fortunately I've never had a major health problem or injury, so all of these decisions weren't life-changing, nor were they super-urgent.
There are still a number of really good doctors who take insurance. They can still make a lot of money through insurance, especially in fields like cardiology and oncology. While a family practice physician is never going to get really rich on a gaggle of routine office visits, you're also not likely to find the best doctors in family practice -- whether American or otherwise.
I also agree with you that some of the highly-rated and highly-touted doctors are not always the best. Sometimes they are famous for some research or pioneered treatment technique, but are poor at diagnosing problems. Other times they are just too arrogant to spend much time with patients, and instead give you rushed answers and are too overly confident to ever think they could be wrong.
I have always suspected Las Vegas' healthcare system was terrible. The few times I've used it, my experiences have not been good. I have noticed that Las Vegas tends to have a lot of "specialty mills", where most of the area specialists join together in a big office, and rush people through like cattle. When I had pink eye in 2010, I experienced this with an ophthalmologist there. I showed up to a giant office, was put in a huge waiting room, and they called me about 30 minutes after my appointment time. Then they called me in, and again I sat in an individual office for 15 minutes with nobody visiting me. Then they finally took some readings on my eyes, and again I waited about 20 minutes before the doctor finally came and saw me. Doctor came in and asked, "How are you doing today?" I responded, "Okay... a little surprised how long the wait was, though." He snapped back, "What do you expect when you call for a same-day appointment? OF COURSE you have to wait!" I didn't like that answer at all. When you have an appointment time, and they're an hour late, that's the office's fault, not the patient's. Not even an apology. I thought this was just a crappy office, but further healthcare experiences in Vegas were all lacking big time in one way or another, and I have since tried to take care of my health needs in the LA area if possible.
I don't really disagree with you either. Basically it's just I have seen no metric whatsoever that tells me that our average is better than other first world countries' average. Or that our very good are any better than their very good. I have no doubt that we have more of the very elite, but it was also my experience that they don't take any insurance often. My experience was with oncologists, and I had a great policy. Didn't matter, they took no insurance. The caveat is I did have an extremely rare cancer, but as you said, it's a big country, and if someone who is the best takes insurance, long waits will occur there also if it's a more common cancer. If someone is elite, he'll eventually have no need to deal with insurance. Considering how much better they are at hard sciences, logic would dictate they might be better in the median, and most metrics seem to point to that. It's hard to filter how many of our issues are lifestyle, and how much is worse healthcare. Either way, I think you'd agree that the increasing cost of our health care is unsustainable, and we spend more per capita than anyone in the world, with no evidence it's money well spent. Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt we very well may fuck up the implementation of this. We fuck up most stuff when it comes to bureaucracy. To me, the best argument against Obamacare is that we'll fuck it up with bureaucracy and corruption during implementation. That is believable, and maybe even likely. That we are risking some gold standard of care is a far less convincing argument imo. And that's the argument I see getting made most often, because it's easier to get emotional about your mom and death panels.
What do you expect from a website that had a no bid contract?
shameful corruption
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechcons...e-who-built-it
This is pretty infuriating...
http://news.yahoo.com/obama-administ...222249311.html
While campaigning for health care reform in 2009, Obama went out of his way to make one thing perfectly clear: if you like your current health care plan, you will be able to keep it.
On June 15, 2009, Obama said this: "We will keep this promise to the American people. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your healthcare plan, you will be able to keep your healthcare plan. Period.”
In 2012, he echoed that sentiment, saying, "“If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”
However, many are finding that not to be the case. More than 300,000 cancellation notices have been sent out in Florida, according to Kaiser Health News, and another 180,000 in California. In New Jersey, the number of cancellations tops 800,000, the Star-Ledger reports.
According to NBC News, approximately 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million Americans who buy their health insurance individually should expect to receive a cancellation letter over the next year "because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law."
This could result in millions of Americans being forced to purchase different policies, potentially at higher premiums.
.
Jeez Shits just getting worse. Now comes out there was a gapping security hole in the website.. (wait till I tell ya last part which even Druff will Laugh at..)
Im copying the 1st part from a story from ABC
The Obamacare website has more than annoying bugs. A cybersecurity expert has found a way to hack into users' accounts.
Until the Department of Health fixed the security hole last week, anyone could easily reset your Healthcare.gov password without your knowledge and potentially hijack your account.
The glitch was discovered last week by Ben Simo, a software tester in Arizona. Simo found that gaining access to people's accounts was frighteningly simple:
Guess an existing user name, and the website will confirm it exists. Claim you forgot your password, and the site will reset it. View the site's unencrypted source code in any browser to find the password reset code. Plug in the user name and reset code, and the website displays a person's three security questions (your oldest niece's first name, name of favorite pet, date of wedding anniversary, etc.). Answer the security questions wrong, and the website spits out the account owner's email address -- again, unencrypted.
Armed with the account holder's email address, a person with malicious intent can easily track down their target on social media, where they're likely to discover the answers to those security questions.
It wouldn't even take a skilled hacker. Anyone with bad intentions -- and a minimal understanding of how to read a website's code -- could have figured it out. While such an attack might not yield your Social Security number or health information, it would expose your address and phone number.
Read more: http://www.abc15.com/dpp/news/nation...#ixzz2j9Ay8Q8q
The last part is major LOLS
Yesterday we find out...the latest worrisome disclosure: that the entire Obamacare website operates on a single computer server in Virginia -- without any backup, according to Congressman Rogers.
I don't know if the Republicans going on with the death panel nonsense really believe what they're saying, or if they realize that the truth of Obamacare's problems (lack of ability to bring down costs, high potential for bureaucratic nightmare) are not as attention-grabbing and easy to reduce to sound bytes.
The Republicans kind of lucked out with this one so far, because after embarrassing themselves with the government shutdown (which was not their fault alone, but they got most of the "credit" for it), attention shifted to the website and the upcoming failures it represents.
So basically Republicans were doing all the wrong things to drum up public dissatisfaction with Obamacare, and then the Obama Administration created the biggest argument against it with their own ineptitude.
I think the one bright side to the website is that it might be waking up the public to the reality of the government abruptly nosing itself into a mammoth industry like healthcare. Many assumed it would be a seamless process, where the evil insurance companies would be brought under control. Instead, it's showing that the government isn't up to the simplest of tasks -- running a signup website -- and that much more complicated administrative matters will likely prove to be an even bigger failure.
I find it unbelievable that all of this is happening less than 3 months before the full launch of Obamacare. This website should have been up by March 1, allowing time to get the kinks out of the process. The fact that it's now being promised for November 30th -- when plans begin January 1st -- is unbelievable. Good luck processing all of the applicants in a month's time.
Hilarious and sad. This is why I absolutely hate providing sensitive personal info to sites like this. They are maintained and managed by morons, and any neckbeard with a little spare time is likely to find a way to harvest all of it. By then, it's too late.
I mean, I can't directly blame Obama for the above, as he neither implemented the site nor was involved in any of the process in creating/securing it.
However, I have said all along that this was going to be a bureaucratic failure of epic proportions, but even I underestimated how bad it would be.
This was simply too big of a task for the government to get done in the time allotted -- at least not without some strict deadline management, which apparently was completely lacking.
The whole thing was poorly conceived from the start. They took a good idea (health care reform), and they mangled it from both conceptual and implementation standpoints.
We can only wait and facepalm, as further failures lurk around the corner.
one of the sites new upgrades
well at least we now know why the Administration was so confident they would get millions of signups to ObamaCare, it was rigged from the start:
Report: Obama administration knew millions would be forced to change insurance
By Mike Krumboltz, Yahoo News | Yahoo News – Mon, Oct 28, 2013
Before the Affordable Care Act became law in 2010, President Barack Obama promised Americans they could keep their health care plans if they liked them. But already hundreds of thousands of citizens are receiving notification that their plans are being canceled because they don't comply with the new law, and, according to NBC News, the Obama administration has known for at least three years the cancellations were coming.
While campaigning for health care reform in 2009, Obama went out of his way to make one thing perfectly clear: If you like your current health care plan, you will be able to keep it.
On June 15, 2009, Obama said this: "We will keep this promise to the American people. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period.”
In 2012, he echoed that sentiment, saying, "“If [you] already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.”
However, many are finding that not to be the case. More than 300,000 cancellation notices have been sent out in Florida, according to Kaiser Health News, and another 180,000 in California. In New Jersey, the number of cancellations tops 800,000, the Star-Ledger reports.
According to NBC News, approximately 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million Americans who buy their health insurance individually should expect to receive a cancellation letter over the next year "because their existing policies don’t meet the standards mandated by the new health care law."
This could result in millions of Americans being forced to purchase different policies, potentially at higher premiums.
So how did the Obama administration know the cancellations would be coming?
The Affordable Care Act states that people who had health insurance prior to March 23, 2010 — the day Obama signed the bill into law — will be able to keep those policies even if they don't meet the requirements of the new law. However, the Department of Health and Human Services tightened that provision so that "if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date — the deductible, co-pay or benefits, for example — the policy would not be grandfathered," NBC News reports.
Because the market for individual insurance experiences significant turnover, the insinuation is the Obama administration had to have known many policies "grandfathered" in would not qualify for the Affordable Care Act. NBC News reports that the administration knew in 2010 that "more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them."
“This says that when they made the promise [that individuals could keep their plans], they knew half the people in this market outright couldn’t keep what they had and then they wrote the rules so that others couldn’t make it either,” Robert Laszewski of Health Policy and Strategy Associates told NBC News.
On Monday, former Obama adviser David Axelrod said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that "most people are going to keep their own plan." When asked about Axelrod's admission of "most" as opposed to all, White House spokesman Jay Carney acknowledge that some individual's plans will be canceled, but countered that the plans they switch to will be better and affordable.
"What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage," Carney said. "… So it's true that there are existing health care plans on the individual market that don't meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act."
Actually, what the president said back in 2009 was "[the Affordable Care Act] is for people who aren’t happy with their current plan. If you like what you’re getting, keep it. Nobody is forcing you to shift."
Only now, some who like their plans are being forced, including Laszewski. According to NBC News, he has a so-called "Cadillac plan" — "the best health insurance policy you can buy," he said — but recently received notice in the mail that it was being canceled.
http://news.yahoo.com/obama-administ...222249311.html
Last edited by Rollo Tomasi; 10-30-2013 at 07:05 AM.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Reply With Quote
