I actually have excellent insurance right now. My daughter spent a week in the hospital last year, and was sent home with a pile of medical supplies for ongoing treatment and we paid nothing. Zero.
Of course, if they can start dicking us around for pre-existing conditions again my whole family is screwed.
This. I love my job. But it also means I’m never, ever, ever leaving my job after my cancer surgery 15 months ago.
It’s a classic: they seem unable to grasp the fact that a private corporation can be as if not more tyrannical than the state.*
[* especially the U.S., which is relatively benevolent to the kind of white person who rants about “soshalism”]
Netherland too. Everybody has compulsory private insurance here. There are minor variations in price and coverage, but there’s a large set of common rules that everybody has to follow. We also have the most expensive health care system of Europe, though. I’ve always suspected that this was because our system is so privatized.
Which is something Obama said in his farewell address. The problem is the goal is not just about wanting to take credit, but to entirely discredit the first black president to discourage anyone else who is African American from running for president and winning. If you make the first black president seem like he sucked, then you telegraph that African Americans aren’t fit for leadership.
If we’re talking pre-ACA here, then company B saves money by dropping the people who develop the costly illnesses, hence not paying for either the preventative nor the curative care. If we’re talking post-ACA, my guess is institutional momentum, i.e. that’s the way they’ve always done it.
What? It’s perfectly rational: their bonuses depend on such numbers, and after the bonuses are in, they’re off to another job on the wave of a “successful” experience.
Executive and shareholder compensation is the root of all evils.
The problem is that the shareholders do not do a proper job of controlling the directors, because they all belong to the same clubs. The original idea of the limited liability company was a good one, but institutional corruption has brought it down.
It’s hard for me not to think of Trump as just a 2-dimensional cartoon character, which is probably not wise.
Nevertheless, I really do expect a newspaper headline like “Trump To Congress: You’re Fired!” within the next four years.
Oh jebus.
I spend so much time focusing on what a piece of shit Turmp is, I’d almost forgotten the other matter of how terrifyingly, perfectly incompetent he also is.
He’s never spent a single hour even seeing someone do this job. In five days he’s supposed to start actually doing it. And he’s literally telling the New York Times that because he tweeted at people, and then stuff happened, he’s qualified to be President of the United States.
You’re not the only one… that’s how he comes off and I am not sure if that’s because he kind of is or if it’s all an act. [quote=“generic_name, post:111, topic:93013”]
“Trump To Congress: You’re Fired!”
[/quote]
And I don’t doubt it, especially given the continued devolution of journalism in America.
Rational only in the short-term view of frightened and greedy senior management who are the products of our broken corporate culture. It’s sort of like wallpapering one’s house in tinfoil is a “rational” response to combatting CIA mind-control rays. Our broken business culture has come to accept the equivalent of mind-control rays (i.e. the next quarter’s numbers are all that matter) as a fact of life.
There’s nothing wrong with executive and shareholder compensation if both groups are concerned with a company’s long-term sustainability (e.g. recognising the return in 5 years on paying for preventative care now). But MBAs are trained to take the short view as you describe, and a lot of stock speculators do, too.
The root of the evils is not necessarily executive and shareholder compensation, or even money; it’s greed and short-term thinking.
In other news, Trump made the sun up this morning. He said so.
“The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.”
The problem with the press is that opinion and conjecture have replaced reporting facts (probably because that sells air-time-- think of CNN focusing almost exclusively on theories around Malaysian Airlines flight 370 for weeks.) But it also seems like this gives conservative media an upper hand, since they can politicize anything and everything and keep Benghazi in the news for years after it was settled; long before “fake news” became an issue Fox News was calling everything “worse than Watergate” if it applied to a Democrat.
This piece on Talking Points Memo was refreshing, though I don’t know if we can expect the media to follow. One salient quote:
Journalists unearth factual information and report it. If Trump wants to turn America into strong man state, journalists should cover that story rather than begging Trump not to be who he is. America isn’t Russia. And I don’t think he can change us into Russia. So unless and until we see publications shut down and journalists arrested or disappeared, let’s have a little more confidence in our values and our history and our country.
…
Trump’s one true gift is his ability to get his critics to surrender up their own dignity somehow of their own free will. That is just what he is trying to do to the press at this moment. It’s no different from the dominance politics he played on his opponents in the GOP primaries.
Trump wants to bully the press and profit off the presidency. He’s told us this clearly in his own words. We need to accept the reality of both. The press should cover him on that basis, as a coward and a crook.
Just a reminder - Health Savings Accounts are just an excuse to compel you and most of America to park a big chunk of your money in Wall Streets hands.
The same benefit can accrue as tax credits calculated against the amount you spend on healthcare in a year. No need to gift our money to Wall Street crooks.
Pence is going to do the job. Trump is going to pretend he’s a charismatic and beloved figurehead and wallow in adulation.
This is the reason that Obamacare as it is will not work.
I don’t have enough faith in them to be competent enough to seize on this fact. They’re too far up their own asses trying to destroy anything Obama might have breathed in the vicinity of to think about stupid shit like governing.
