hes a huge kopite, but he is funny!
Current Affairs General US politics (ie, not POTUS related)
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hes a huge kopite, but he is funny!
Except, of course, for the lovely man who does our garden, his sweet wife who cleans our house, and their wonderful kids who wash dishes at the restaurant down the street.
Extreme times deserve extreme exceptions...hahaha. He's boss.
Martin Alvito
Player Valuation: £50m
I don't think you understand why insurers and pharmaceuticals operate in the way they do.
They both fully participate in every dime they save by adding adminstrative burden, but only participate in a portion of the associated costs. It should now be obvious that their profit-maximizing strategy involves high prices, a high level of administrative burden and an enormous amount of societal waste. It's why ten percent of our population works in health care, but only about two percent works in a profession that delivers care, and they spend roughly half their time doing things other than deliver care.
This (and other externalities) can only be cured through regulation. It's no different than the tax code. Back when Congress was functional, they addressed these problems once every generation or so. Bipartisan legislation would address the worst abuses and close loopholes, a new set of carve-outs would get the legislation over the line, and once things got out of hand again the process would repeat.
We're now saddled with a tax code from the '80s and HMO legislation from the '70s that have been amended, but not overhauled. Our fiscal problems largely stem from the enormous amount of waste and fraud now inherent in both systems, as do our problems with income inequity as properly measured by real income after both taxation and unavoidable costs like food, fuel and health care.
Change can only come from voting to fire your member of Congress and replacing them with someone who will get the money out of politics, so that Congress can address these problems unfettered. If you're already doing that, the next step is to persuade those around you to do the same.
summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
Normal country.
This could also go in the Post Funny Stuff thread.
If Republicans could run on the "lets end sex for fun" that would be absolutely spectacular. Maybe they could run an ad like "Every 22 seconds a man shouldn't think about sex" and other idiotic regressive nonsense. Clowns.
If Republicans could run on the "lets end sex for fun" that would be absolutely spectacular. Maybe they could run an ad like "Every 22 seconds a man shouldn't think about sex" and other idiotic regressive nonsense. Clowns.
"If only we could convince the Feminists to overturn decades of progress they've achieved and work instead for a world where all the power was returned to men. You know, but still as Feminists.".
That's some top quality joined-up conservative thinking right there.
carolinablue232
Player Valuation: £70m
Our healthcare system is so overly complicated but the solutions are also not as simple as what some suggest. We tend to drastically over engineer regulation which leads to a lot of the administrative burden/cost you’re alluding to. Consider the ACA…What started as a federal platform has moved to a largely state based exchange model which means multi state payers have to constantly comply with 30-40 different sets of changes and regulations. The intent might be good but states don’t consider that ultimately all of that administrative burden still gets passed on as cost to enrollees or they’re paid out as subsidies coming from the tax payer. Similarly while payers are required to pay out something like 85% of collected premiums as claims, that just means the only way to keep profits going is to raise cost. 15% of $10bil in claims is a lot bigger than 15% of $100mil. There’s nuance there of course but I have very little faith our current government can effectively solve anything as it relates to healthcare.
there's a real phobia of anything run publicly at the federal level.
And after living here a while I can see why.
Take the Post office - no savings accounts, no bill pay - no tons of stuff offered in Irish/British post offices.
No effort to get on the Amazon delivery train or UPS/Fedex. Seems the only way they make money is sending me unstoppable junk mail.
Then there's Amtrack. Thats a laugh.
As you mentioned, the federal healthcare exchange.
There are a few other examples of halfarsed public service I've forgotten.
Schools seem to run well but thats hyper local, not federal as such.
It's funny. I've lived all over the place and so much countries have pride in well run public sector operations.
Not here. I dont know which came first, the crappy service or the distain for it.
carolinablue232
Player Valuation: £70m
The corrupt politicians came first. The crappy service and disdain followed as a result.
I wish I could laugh.
Martin Alvito
Player Valuation: £50m
It all traces back to William F. Buckley and the conservative movement in the late '60s, as the Republicans picked up the pieces from Goldwater getting destroyed in '64. They were adamantly opposed to everything in the Great Society, and realized the best strategy to fight back was low taxes and convincing people government is incompetent, on the basis of its inability to function well without adequate funding.
Admittedly, Congress by design is not well suited to oversight. The age of the membership doesn't help, but it was set up to be a deliberative body of upper and lower houses with wildly different constituencies. It's not supposed to do much of anything until there's a huge problem, which does not enable it to contend well with the pace of modern technological change. They're always playing catch-up ball.
That said, there's a laundry list of federal alphabet soup agencies you would not want to do without. The problems at the FDA and SEC in recent years are particularly galling, because those are agencies we need functioning well. Our lives and economy depend on them.
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