Tryingtologin
Member
Alright, alright, joke's over. Who ever hacked Alex and Rihad's account, stop posting...
So what about all those "socialist" countries that have more efficient healthcare than the United States? People have better coverage and costs are LOWER. United States ranks #46 in healthcare cost efficiency. There are 45 countries ahead of us, and almost all of them have government issued insurance in one form or another. FACT. So at least get your facts straight before ranting. Costs do not go up, but rather down when you compare "socialist" healthcare of other countries to the current healthcare system of the United States.
This just shows that you don't understand the principles that this country was founded on. It's not that "if the government is trying to do anything, it must be tyrannical". It's that our country was founded on a constitution as a Constitutional Republic. That Constitution is very clear about what our Federal Government is allowed to do. Had they stuck to those guidelines this would be a much different and much better country that wouldn't be wasting trillions of dollars.The problem with the healthcare debate in America, is the same problem for most other major policy debates in that (your country), and it comes down to the framing. You have psycho-Republicans framing the mantra from the Revolutionary War (yes, that one ... nearly 250 years ago), and that mantra is "tyranny". If the government is trying to do anything, it must be tyrannical.
So you believe the lie that is the "Clinton Balanced budget". He did something that is called "creating internal debt". He "balanced the budget" by stealing from Social Security and many other trust funds. Basically he decided that the money that was brought into the trust funds that year that wasn't spent "that year" was a surplus and used that money to "balance" his budget. What he really did was create internal debt (that will NEVER be repaid) by "stealing" from the future retired people by taking the money that is supposed to be waiting for them when they retire. So now we have a Social Security system that is going bankrupt because Clinton and the other crooks in DC have stolen from it for decades. Had they left it alone it most likely would have worked exactly as planned.Then you get pre&post-Clinton Democrats (basically, Clinton is your best President ever by almost any economics measure ... ) who have this great set of ideas but no head for the economics.
And then you have just about the worst system of elected government in the world (let's put it this way, when American lawmakers re-structured Japan after boom-kicking everyone in WWII, they ran as far away from their own system as they could; encourages deadlock, makes minimal sense at most structural junctures).
And what happens is a cluster-you-know-what.
Bringing this back to healthcare: on one side it's positions such as Bulldog's (and he has every right to hold whatever opinion he likes - I'm not questioning that), and on the other is "we'll take care of it and if you don't support it you're a millionaire scumbag", with neither side's position philosophically capable of creating a middle ground.
Add to that people with money and their lobbyists: no wonder your system is up $hit creek without a paddle
The core problem with the US is that it is run by lawyers for the benefit of lawyers.
@Bulldog - I understand the system of government and the Constitution v.well. I've studied it extensively and taught a v.short course on a v.small aspect of it. Obviously am not an expert making a living at it, and obviously am keeping things brief.
Article 1 gave Congress the power to legislate, and legislate it did. Your hated departments and agencies come as the result of that. Furthermore, 'agency' is just an arm (and "agent") of the government, far from unconstitutional.
The lobbyists come from and with insurance companies. Just like they comes from and with oil companies when we talk alternative fuel technology, they come from coal and logging companies when we talk environment etc. For my take, the profession should be made unlawful (though not illegal). It's corruption in its simplest and purest form. Naturally their are government-aligned/employed lobbyists as well.
The problem here lies chiefly with the structure of government, and having 2 branches (let's leave judiciary out of this for now) that are required to run one agenda (governance). Having an executive body beholden to the legislative body in the USA model is a fatal flaw, and has been for (well) over a century.
Regarding the "free market": it doesn't work. Unregulated systems never have, and trying to relabel system failures as "market corrections" stopped being a successful excuse some time ago. Pure capitalism is a failed philosophy, just as pure socialism or pure communism is/was. Look at every major industry in the world, and look at what the free market did to whittle down competition and establish a monopoly, a duopoly or an informally price-fixed market:
-Petrol
-Supermarkets (call it food)
-Banking
-Finance
-Construction
-Shipping (logistics)
-Military hardware
-Biotech
Pick an industry that operates in a generally unregulated free market, and the end result is inevitably a lack of competition, followed by price gouging from those left over.
Free markets don't work they way free marketeers say they do. Hell, pick a finance collapse. The free market system crashes date back some three hundred years. Proponents call it a "market adjustment", but that's like saying the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union was a "system adjustment" or something.
For healthcare, there's absolutely zero evidence that the free market system creates any improvement in quality of service. The problem is that it isn't an optional service, not in its strictest sense. Companies aren't competing for disposal income. People are ALWAYS going to spend money on health, one way or the other, so insurance companies aren't driven by a need to improve quality; their customers will always exist.
For healthcare, at the very, very least, the insurance companies will create new packages (cheaper) to get business from those now covered by ObamaCare but want better input and particulars. It establishes competition, which is something that is lacking for the lower socio-economic classes.
I've never counted bar weight...
All my lifts are free weights, no machines.
When everyone does a bench press, they are automatically lifting the bar too, so why include its weight when comparing?
Of course, we are ALL lifting the bar as well, so it is work being done.
I workout at home... I don't go around telling people how much I can lift...it's just easier for me to count the plates in reference to my HST.
if I included the bar weight when I log my lifts on my app, it would cause a lot of unnecessary calculating...
Sent from my iPhone...
When doing t-bar rows although you're using a 45lb bar, you're not lifting the entire bar completely off of the ground which is why I don't add the bar to that exercise. I think it's hard to determine exactly how much of the bar weight you're actually lifting as compared say bench press or bar row. Every other exercise I add the bar.
HST history has been made today!