birdog1960

sure, it was the war of northern aggression...i've had that said to me as if i was personally responsible. what the south did was treason. plain and simple. but i suppose in the name of liberty, that's ok. just depends on whose liberty one is speaking of.

and a large proponderance of academic historians (as opposed to self designated historians) disagree with you. it was primarily about slavery.

how, exactly, was my statement on perry false? that was the name of the place. he squirmed to explain it away. he personally leased the place. are you caught up on the word lodge. my word, i generally call place devoted to hunting and fishing lodges. maybe the ones i've been to are nicer than perry's camp but i doubt it

it's a good example that i wasn't aware of til the show highlighted it. then i read about it. so what? not a talking point but an example and one including a fairly competitive candidate for president.

how long would you expect a swastika flag to fly over a european motorway?

yes, it was. great episode....really clever dialogue. so "lodge", "camp", whatever...doesn't change the point.

he and his family leased it for years. did you read the article? maybe you should spend $20 on a GED.

really? http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-10-01/politics/35280518_1_rick-perry-white-paint-rock

can't think of any other developed, 1st world nation that fought a civil war over slavery. so, in that shameful way, we're unique. and the scars and deep seated resentment are more obvious and closer to the surface here than in most other developed countries, imo. some group is hanging a 15 foot confederate flag to be clearly visible from the interstate in richmond. the proponents say it's about history and heritage but a spokesman for the naacp said it well: if they'd won, i'd be in chains. then there's rick perry's hunting lodge in texas, named "n$%%#@head". squirmed all over himself trying to make that one look benign. so, yeah, i'd say we're at least worse than average when it comes to racism.

asheville and chapel hill are the two best towns to live in the state imo.

this http://www.huffingto..._b_3688298.html is what's happening in education in nc. so they've got duke and unc and then they've got elementary and high school teachers leaving or threatening to leave in droves. 46th in the country in teacher pay and driving quickly towards last it's not like the public school achievement standards have ever been stellar there. this will take them back decades. if you are sending your kids to school here you better make sure they're not being taught by a student or noncertified teacher. this is no less than a frontal attack on public schools and the results ail be ugly. think i'll stick with the old dominion. many believe this group is behind much of this http://www.parentsun...ucation-agenda/. the hand of the kochs reach far.

the politico article mostly points out problem with methodology in these estimates. this article talks about the biggest reason for higher estimates: http://m.usatoday.com/article/news/2021963. "much of the reason for higher claims cost is that sicker people are expected to join the pool..." wow. imagine that. a healthcare system that takes care of and insures the sickest patients. just ridiculous! we should be cherrypicking the healthy to insure. it's much cheaper and we can make more profit.

so the threshold now is that some middle class folks have access to private insurance. why? single payer still provides basic care for the vast majority that can't afford it....and that's kinda the point. needn't inspire defensiveness or anger in a single payer proponent. i suppose it's all dependent on ones goals for a health care system. if it's to provide the best overall care to the largest percentage of the population, single payer is clearly the choice. if it's "what's best for me", the choice becomes totally individual. oh and btw, the concept of tiered care mitigates the big, bad bogeyman of incentive for the best and brightest to choose medicine, not that i think that was ever likely to be a problem anyway

seems your reading comprehension defect is not limited to my posts...unless i've suddenly developed dyslexia, this manifesto is about the belief that the presence of preferential care in the UK proves that their single payer system is a failure. now you say such an argument is irrelevant. and now you are correct: standard issue is a ford focus but some folks buy bentley's...so what? and maybe you should avoid political discussions with strangers at hockey games...just a thought.

this is priceless. i'd have put you on ignore months ago if you weren't so entertaining. IT"S NOT RELEVANT....YOU WERE THE ONE WHO BROUGHT IT UP! nearly by definition, that makes it irrelevant. if it weren't for your combing the want ads we may never have entered this deep, important discussion on tiered care. and you accuse me of talking out both sides on my mouth? the fact that a small minority of people could, can and will always be able to get preferential treatment in healthcare or in anything else is not relevant to a debate on single payer. i'm, so very relieved that you agree.

show me where i've ever said it will solve all problems. i've stated it was a work in progress at least a half dozen times. yall have a reading comprehension problem.

nothiung phony about it. i've never heard a proponent of single payer say that those with excellent insurance currently will do better. it's about insuring the currenty uninsured. wanna improve life expectancy and infant mortality? rhetorical question, i suspect here i'd get some negative replies). easiest way is to improve care to folks that have littler or no care currently. attempting to improve care for thems that got isn't likely to change the numbers much. and guess what we've been doing up until the advent of the ACA?

they are related to many variables. here's a few: access to health care, minimum wage below living wage, drug abuse, alcoholism, hopelessness, smoking, poor diet. and these in turn our multifactorial. but it appears our system in general, results in an inordinately large number of people affected, a comparitiely large underclass. socialized medicine certainly won't cure all the problems but it will help.

you just don't get it, do you? single payer is aimed at providing a chicken in every pot and some salad. that improves the life expectancy, infant mortality, etc that we so frequently see cited in soft publications like nejm. it's not aimed at providing coq au vin with truffles to everyone. people can and do pay for the extras. there's no intent to stop them. and they might live longer and healthier due to the extra money they put out but it's very debatable. more likely they'll wait less for procedures and tests. what we have now is a system in which a few people get coq au vin, many people get chicken wings and way too many get table scraps on occasion. they don't generally do well health wise...and we end up ranking 37th in the world in life expectancy. that's what single payer advocates aim to fix. it's a obviously a lower priority to others.

here's some words i wrote earlier. "noble and extraordinary things for reasons other than financial gain. no ambiguity to the meaning yet you misunderstood. clearly the sentence conveys the belief that noble and extraordinary things can be done for financial gain. kinda makes the cartoon above actually a little funny. just a little.

ya know, i never thought of that...but it's clearly the most reasonable explanation. and the new england journal, editted and mostly written by american physicians is complicit..

who said anything about eliminating financial incentives? of course, there has to be a payoff for the work. but i suspect it doesn't need to be at the current level which, for specialists at least, is far above anywhere else in the world, on average (the percentage of health care dollars spent on primary care docs in the us is about 6% to give some perspective). i agree that compensation needs to be at the top end of competing professions in order to justify the effort and sacrifice for the majority of prospective students. so if you're in the top 3-4% of compensation for the country you live in, is that not enough incentive? does it need to be the top 1-2%? doesn't appear to be the case in many other countries. but changing funding for medical education would help and would likely be necessary.

if it were all about the money, why would he even go to med school at all? he wasn't a wet behind the ears 22 yo when starting. pushing 40 when he finished. and all those intervening years at no or little income. from a strictly financial perspective, it probably wasn't a good decision. so, no, it wasn't about the money. and there are more and more nontraditional students making the same decision. i see that as a very good thing. the fact that funding for medical education hasn't significantly changed yet doesn't mean it won't. necessity is the mother of invention, as they say.

you cons just refuse to believe that people actually do noble and extraordinary things for reasons other than financial gain. why is that so difficult for you to accept? or is it that it doesn't neatly fit in your philosophy?yes, va contracts with private entities for some services, largely because the entire us system is currently a hybrid model which therefore loses much of the economy of scale. plenty of examples of successful, efficient, cost effective single payer systems around.