My question is sincere. How much does one need to accumulate?
A group of 100 squirrels has an orchard of 67 trees for their provision.
1 squirrel has 22 trees for food, shelter, winter stock, and accumulation.
9 squirrels share 29 trees for the same - a very decent 3+ trees per squirrel.
40 squirrels have 15 trees - not an huge overflow, but enough to allow idle chatter
50 squirrels share 1 tree and whatever wind/rain shakes off the other trees.
Well no one cares about squirrels, so what if it were the next 100 people that one sees - family, acquaintances, strangers, beggars in the street?
Not aimed at PP, I shouldn’t have tagged her post.
This thread is a desert, devoid of compassion, empathy, even humanity.
In that analogy, I see myself as one of the 50 squirrels. Nothing wrong with approaching the first squirrel and helping him gather nuts, as long as you get to keep some of them. Or maybe planting a couple of acorns instead of eating them in the hope of having your own tree some day.
Its just not OK when the self appointed cat comes along and tells all of the squirrels “if you get too fat (an I’ll let you know when), I’m gonna eat you!”.
That isn’t what pre-existing conditions mean. You need to maybe look it up. Car insurance does not cover accidents that happened before you got insurance (what pre-existing conditions means). You cannot wreck your car, then go buy insurance and have the insurance cover it. That’s called fraud. And it would probably make auto insurance completely unaffordable, because you are better off not buying it unless you wreck. Auto insurance is also incredibly cheap comparatively. Largely because it doesn’t cover pre-existing accidents or general maintenance the way health care does.
See, here is the thing, that already exists and is perfectly legal. You could go get people together and do that if you wanted. People don’t do it because it’s nonsensical. There is absolutely NO risk with pre-existing conditions. You have it already. You need treatment. Period. It is a known quantity. There is absolutely no risk of anything. And again, what you are discussing here isn’t insurance, it would just be a pooling of costs. People don’t do it, because for a pool of people with pre-existing conditions the premiums would have to be higher than just paying for the treatment due to administrative costs. You would be paying to have a middle man between you and medical service. That doesn’t happen because it is cheaper and more efficient just to pay your medical bills.
If you personally feel medical care is a right, thanks to our free(ish) market, I am not allowed to stop you from providing it to anyone you want. Isn’t that great!?! More power to you, go out and get it done!
I follow you now. Don’t think I did at first because the situations aren’t exactly analogous.
I can agree with what you’re saying to an extent.
I think that by not covering people’s medical conditions, they become less productive members of society, plain and simple. The “pull yourself up by the bootstraps - self determinism” that the right believes in is basically out of the window.
You could have insurance companies charge a premium based on the person’s existing medical needs * a “risk for complications” that allows them to maintain a margin.
Risk of getting sick is no longer there, insurance in the traditional sense is not there…I understand that. But progression of type 2 diabetes vs a person with congestive heart failure is different. The amount of treatment needed is different, risk of complications, etc…etc…this can be assessed and covered.
This allows a person to still be covered for big incidents that come up, such as a person with type 2 diabetes that has been so poorly controlled that they know need their foot amputated, or their leg amputated. Does that make sense? That is just one scenario, but one that I have seen and see somewhat regularly. Without insurance, that person is pretty much screwed, no way they can afford that surgery. If their medications cost $70 per month, and their diabetes hasn’t progressed much, lets say their risk for complications is low - a factor of 1.5 is applied…they pay $105/month. Obviously that is fictional, but my point is it can be done.
I’d say that is better than just letting them be unproductive members of society because they’re constantly sick…but that’s just my opinion. You seem like you like to argue lol.
Definitely is preventable, but it’s also incredibly common…not going away anytime soon with our activity levels in this country and our poor food choices.
Hardship exemptions don’t seem terribly hard to come by. In theory it should cover everything.
Pragmatic measures often work. Your idea that every kind of ‘‘central planning’’ is bad is dogmatic.
You don’t get to choose who you are.
Everyone is trying to survive.[quote=“countingbeans, post:227, topic:224248”]
It’s not my job to make people happy. If they weren’t happy they wouldn’t have taken the job.
And yes, you always have a choice to make.
[/quote]
People take jobs because they have too.
How do you know?
In my situation it wasn’t about hiring servile people I’ll give it to you. But it wasn’t either about the most qualified or educated.
It’s clearly not. It’s weak and something you probably read in those books written by other dogmatic minds.
Republican in your case, but could have been from the ancient Egypt or Saudi Arabia if you were born there.
Clearly not.
You should care that you are not making what you should be making as someone down the ladder, because someone up it wants to make even more even if he is doing already great while you are not. I get you are not exactly surviving right now if you are taking the time to try to make me mean something I am not like above but it could be your case too.
Inequality taxes would be a good start.
Most of the levers, but that wasn’t the point.
I am going to turn the way I want if I have the most hands on the wheel.
Nothing wrong with that. If the market offers it, great. But that’s not what we are talking about. We are talking about government compulsion. Government forcing insurance companies to offer a product.
Should insurance companies cover pre existing conditions because they choose or should they be forced to?
I know this seems a bit off topic, but I feel it’s linked. Lets drag down the top and somehow that will fix the bottom. Taking wealthy individuals money doesn’t suddenly bring others out of poverty and making everyone’s insurance shitty and expensive doesn’t suddenly heal the sick.
Which is why people with pre-existing conditions pay into their own pot separate of others.
This is such a dead horse though I think I’ve said it at least 5x. I’m not sure how I feel about the government compusing people to be covered for pre-existing conditions. What would you propose if people with pre-existing conditions were being denied left and right? I guess I could create an insurance company to fill that niche lol
Like this more civil and intelligent approach to debating this subject, but I have to agree with MoreMuscle here–until the obesity epidemic is forestalled and remedied, type 2 diabetes is not going anywhere and will only become more prevalent. With 70% of the populace overweight, I think this would be a good candidate for what MM is talking about–and at some point this same conversation (or a very similar one) has to be had considering the increasing obesity rates.
I don’t think his solution is tidy, but we do need to start thinking about situations like these.
In the context of this quote, that is bullshit. You don’t get to choose your parents and you don’t get to choose the environment you grow up in–or your genetics–but you damn sure have control over whether you take ownership of your future. When Beans is talking about “dead end people” he’s not talking about their past growing up or their genetics–he’s talking about their attitude towards their possible futures.
Take Ben Carson–born in Detroit in the ghetto, single mom, broke AF. He had every excuse in the book to say “the system keeps me down”. He didn’t–he became the youngest Johns Hopkins Neurosurgery department head in their history. And successful, and a (super terrible) candidate for POTUS.
NOBODY has a fair start compared to 100% of the people in the country. It will never be that way. It will always be harder for some than others. But that has exactly zero to do with a person’s choice to give up or strive to be better than they are.
Seriously?? No. Just no. I don’t give a flying fuck that Bill Gates has 80 bajillion dollars and I don’t. What someone else has obtained has exactly ZERO bearing on my ability to obtain what I want. I have exactly zero concern that someone makes more than me–because it has zero bearing on my ability to make more or do whatever the fuck I want.
This is a complex topic for certain, and I feel that I see both sides of the issue here. I am not sure I can square my limited government principles with government compulsion of the insurance companies (although, obviously, interstate competition for market share would begin fixing a shitload of the cost issues. Inexplicably this has never been legislated…). However, I am also not sure I can square denying tons of people due to some issue that is population wide.
In my opinion we should open up the market for competition among a number of other things.
This is my last post on this subject as most of you have zero desire to see anything but your rah rah corporate poster hanging on the office wall mentality.
The average IQ is 100, not 120-140 most of you likely have, so these wonderful 6 figure jobs you have earned (i sincerely commend your effort) are not open to most of them short of being an entreprenuer. The 10s of millions of people not working can’t uproot themselves and their families to be lumberjacks in CA for $14 /hr, particularly in CA. Many of the trees in my analogy have been sold and transferred out of the orchard. They are not available any longer to the bottom 50% at any price. The buying power of American salary has been dropping since its peak in the 60s - 2 decades before your births. Dont tell me GNP has risen - its population base is 50% higher than when salary buying power peaked in the 60s, houses sell for the price of airplanes, we have printed money uncessingly - of course its higher, way higher.
My bottom line is that you are championing the ultra weathly, who are draining the hope of our society - which is to provide a decent living for themselves and their families. What? You won the brains lottery and Joe across town can piss off because he is only smart enough to work on an assembly line and not be all he can be like the poster said?
Based on the historic ratios of CEO compensation to worker pay.
Each business is the sum of its assets and revenue generating potential (I know I am telling Noah about the flood here, since you’re an accountant, I’m just starting from basics). Every employee has some value as part of that revenue generating, hence their compensation, and such compensation is a claim on the company in exchange for that value.
Proportionally, CEOs now claim exponentially more of that compensation - that claim of the business’s compensation pie, the revenue they all collectively generate - than workers do, historically. But is that because CEOs literally add exponentially more value than they used to? Hard to see that being the case. CEOs have different job responsibilities than they used to, but not that different. Their productivity - their value-add to the revenue generating - isn’t a thousand times what it used to be.
And to be clear, I’m not one of those people that believes that just because the “market” has set the pay for CEOs at an outsized number means that the pay can’t be criticized as bad or wrong. Market inefficiencies exist, and the “market” isn’t so much setting this pay as it is being set by lazy BODs and cartel economics of a limited supply of “qualified” CEOs.
And don’t get me wrong, none of this is to say good CEOs aren’t worth good money or that I don’t appreciate what they do - my point is all this is relative to the value they add, which isn’t what the “market” is currently divining, and some of those precious limited resources a business has is better deployed in other areas (like investing in and better paying workers).
