Blah blah blah, big government, blah blah blah, don't try anything new, even when there is a problem, blah blah blahQuote:
Originally Posted by dave252
Go back to jerking off in GA
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Blah blah blah, big government, blah blah blah, don't try anything new, even when there is a problem, blah blah blahQuote:
Originally Posted by dave252
Go back to jerking off in GA
Jerking off? That doesn't fit in with abstinence only education (anyone remember Jocelyn Elder?).Quote:
Originally Posted by Oli
Nice Dave
Or our recently departed President's administration.Quote:
Originally Posted by SarahG
You still don't know what you're talking about. My dad didn't go to high school because there weren't any. College preparatory academies were few & far between, only in the cities or near the colleges, & private.Quote:
Originally Posted by SarahG
What professional class? You're talking about the sliver of people who went to college. We were an agrarian society & economy until WWII. We would probably have pulled out of the depression years earlier if not for the dust bowl. What we would consider middle class was a small part of the population, & most of it got wiped out by the depression. Expanded secondary education was part of the New Deal stimulous to build schools & keep teenagers out of the job market if possible. The depression & war industrialization brought on the mass flight to the cities. High school was elective & still is for the most part. You have more dropouts because you have more people starting in the first place. It's expected. It didn't used to be. What you see as the norm was built up in the post war boom of the late '40s, '50s, '60s, & early '70s.
Actually, we still dominate technology, & we've always imported brain power to do it. So what?Quote:
America used to dominate technical and scientific fields, graduated more scientists and engineers than any other country. Today we have to import them from other countries because we simply don't have the graduates to fill our domestic needs.
& that would be where? You try to make it seem like the norm. I'm not a blog-rube.Quote:
How could anyone consider a district with a 75% drop out rate to be anything BUT a failure?
The grid is nationalized the same way the rails are, or the cross-country phone lines & pipelines. It's all regulated & built under eminent domain, but still in private hands.Quote:
Before you say I don't know what I am talking about, you really should go read some history books and see the history of our grid. :roll:
Yeah whatever. All schools are socialized & always have been. That's the structure. The only education that isn't socialized is private tutoring, & a case can be made that that's socialized for the most part too. Got a point? By the way, red-baiting doesn't work.Quote:
I never said it was nationalized. I said it was socialized (surely you know the difference?).
The VA has its own hospital system. Not to be confused with the military hospital system. Both have their problems, but neither has any relation whatsoever to a universal single payer plan. You're comparing apples & oranges. Nobody's talking about a takeover of the healthcare system. Just the financial system. That's where the problem lies. The clinics & outpatient facilities will happen because that's what'll get paid for. That'll empty the waiting rooms at the ERs & make them manageable, without the 10 to 12 hour waits. When you have full access to the books of the providers & the accounting expertise, you can affect the market price. Free the providers from the insurance chaos & they'll streamline. It doesn't even take the insurance companies out of the picture entirely. It just creates a buffer & eliminates the ability to pay caveat. Private insurance companies are already working with medicare, & it seems to work fine. A few bumps here & there, but it certainly simplifies things for the patient.
Healthcare shouldn't be tied to a job. The only reason we have that in place is because all this started with union contracts & trust fund accounts that farmed out the details to those with expertise. It wasn't perfect but it worked. It's too limited. We can do better, make it more inclusive, & cheaper in the long run. Free the employer from sole burdon of coverage, & you make them immediately more competitive with companies from countries around the world who have already dealt with this problem. Wage raises & personnel increases are easier to absorb also. There's no downside to doing this.
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You have to be able to walk before you can run, and the feds simple refuse to, in practice, commit themselves to the few things that they have socialized.
Forgive me for quoting from two distinct posts, SarahG. But on these points we agree. The problem lies not entirely with the commitment of politicians, but with our own commitment. If people are committed to public education, they need to elect officials who won’t sabotage public education with unfunded mandates and idiotic testing schemes. They need to elect people who won’t cut education at the first sign of a budget crunch. Public education works when people are dedicated to it. The same is true of social security, government health care etc. All we have to do is decide what we want and commit ourselves to it.Quote:
Sure, we can blame the politicians all we want for "ruining programs" but, those politicians are in office for a reason... they're who we keep electing into offices.
This realization establishes a basic asymmetry between public and private. Without oversight or regulation, no amount of public commitment will improve private insurance, or private education. Short term cost effective strategies will always trump strategies that are long term and more costly on the short run. That’s why insurance companies are willing to pay for prosthetic limbs but not for the care that would have prevented the diabetes that killed the limb in the first place.
Obama is like a fighter that has taken a dive. He has givien into all the demands from corrupt healthcare titans that financed his campaign which is the biggest con job in american history.
HOWS THIS FOR TRYING SOMETHING NEW! How about making our healthcare premiums tax deductable? how about giving tax break incentives to the insurance companies to give lower income people lower rates? How about giving doctors a tax break to treat uninsured people at minimal or no cost? there maybe better alternatives than giving those a-holes in washington more control over our lives. do any of you really believe that if washington took control of healthcare that your taxes wouldnt go up? think about it, they would have to make a whole new dept of healthcare, overstaff it, pay all these federal employees a salary then pay the doctor and hospital bills. you may not like the current situation, but i would bet my life that in the end you would pay more taxes that your premiums are now. maybe its just my lack of trust in our goverment officials who have done nothing but make themselves and thier cronies rich.Quote:
Originally Posted by Oli
Tax tweaks aren't going to fix anything. It only affects the higher brackets & doesn't expand the pool.
if you make it affordable, it does expand the pool. when computers first came on the market, the prices were out of reach for the common man, when they became reasonable, did the POOL expand? When dvd players first came out, they were expensive, now you can walk into walmart and buy one for 39 bucks, everyone has a dvd player, the pool expanded! hd tvs, the same thing. so if you have incentives to make healthcare insurance affordable the pool will expand.Quote:
Originally Posted by hippifried