Vertigo

Here's a doctor doing it right- now if we could get the whole healthcare industry to follow this guy's lead we wouldn't need insurance or charity except in a few rare cases. https://neucare.net/pricing/

Insurance inflates that market - when they negotiate the rates with the providers. The providers, in order to get a more favorable negotaited rate, will inflate their costs. So when an individual without insurance seeks care they get the inflated cost without the lower negotiated rate. You can't honestly tell me the market dictates that two ibuprofen pills in a hospital is $50 when I can go to Wal-mart and buy a bottle of 50 for $5.

Healthcare should be cheap enough that anyone could afford a doctors visit, or even an ER visit for non life threatening injury. But we get the middlemen (insurance, government) that artifically inflate costs.

What even worse is that we in fact even NEED charity to pay for medical costs with the exception of a very few rare instances.

It's funny. And if people had been playing golf without paying their greens fees, cart and club rental thus driving up the costs for everyone else, it would be germane too!

Yes- the new airmen coming into my unit are waiting on uniform items as well. Even though the budget was passed, FM hasn't been given the OK to release the funds.

Which will be the perfect incentive for no one to ever come forward again. Doing the right thing shouldn't require you to be a martyr. It shouldn't be illegal for you to expose illegal activity.

Pfft. I wish!

American Hustle just drug along... I love smart, well written/and acted movies. And this had that. For 30 seconds here and there. Throughout the entire 2 hour movie there was maybe 15 minutes of REALLY well written scenes with some fantastic acting. The rest of it was ZZZzzz. Good thing the wife was frisky and kept me entertained. No you're not getting pics, you animals.

SurelySerious also likes it when TSA agents grope his kids at the airport.

Yeah! Fuck the Constituion and the 4th amendment! Who the fuck really needs freedom? Give me Orwell's 1984 any day over privacy.

AGR - I just had my position MCR'd from Tech to AGR and I don't regret it. There was no way I would ever had made it to a techician retirement with my years of service when I took the job, but now that I'm AGR I only have to do 5 short years and I'm good

Until people start voting third and fourth party candidates in respectable numbers, there will be no remedy and hardly any accountability. Politicians now know they can lie and have a decent chance of getting away without any repercussions. But if we, the electorate, were to stop voting within only two parties and actually have 3, 4, 5 viable candidates for offices then there's a greater chance a broken promise will get punished and thus less incentive for a candidate to slough off their promise.

I'll tell you what will happen- people will still keep voting for one candidate with either a R or a D next to their name- not many has the guts to try and change the system even though they bitch about it constantly. Do you really think we can trust politicians to follow through on their promises? Obama promised GITMO. Bush II promised jews he'd move the U.S embassy in Israel to Jerusalem- it's still in Tel Aviv. Bush the elder had "no new taxes". Heck even Thomas Jefferson campaigned as a constructionist yet pushed through the Louisiana Purchase. Clinton promised middle class tax cuts- never happened. Woodrow Wilson ran on a campaign of staying out of war and then threw us into WWI. FDR's campaign centered on balancing the budget- yet he ballooned the deficit. LBJ promised no ground troops in Vietnam. But, by all means, continue to believe everything would have been unicorns and rainbows under Romney.

I'm not saying he wouldn't have pushed to change the law, maybe repealed portions of the law, but to believe he would've outright scrapped the whole thing is naive at best.

And believing he would have completely repealed the ACA is just as stupid.

And we all know how candidates ALWAYS follow through on their campaign promises *cough cough Gitmo*

So she would've voted for the guy who passed legislation for which the ACA was modeled after? Does not compute.

Uhh... yeah I don't think he'll be getting any for awhile.

Trust me I'm no fan of the mandate either, but your complaint started out about having to pay into a pool for coverage you don't need- not that you are required to have insurance- so that's what I was addressing. I'm not a smoker so I most likely will never have to have treatment for COPD or lung cancer... yet my rates go to pay for those who do. That's how pools work.

I guarantee you, if you rent, your rent reflects the property owners tax liability.

If not by competition than indirectly by mandate with the 80/20 rule.

So kinda like how I pay for lung cancer and COPD treatments for smokers yet I don't smoke. Or how I pay personal property taxes that support local schools when others don't. Welcome to this thing we call "society".

I get what you're saying for the most part and I agree with most of it, but this portion doesn't make sense. Just because a 60 year old woman is covered for pre-natal, it doesn't mean she uses that coverage. So if she's not using that coverage, how are the insurers out of pocket any more than if she didn't have that coverage? They're not. Once the actual costs are realized and the insurers discover these mandates that aren't getting used isn't costing them what they anticipated I would expect these rates to drop. It may take a couple years but... Look at it like - Let's say the government mandated that all homeowners insurance policies nationwide must cover hurricane damages. Well the insurers are going to say this is going to cost us a fortune so we must raise our rates! But the reality is just because it's covered it doesn't mean there's going to be that many claims submitted... especially from those of us in the midwest or nowhere near the coastline. So while technically I, and hundreds of thousands of others, are "covered" against any hurricane we'll never submit a claim for that and the insurance companies will never have any actual costs associated with that coverage.