finknottle

The complaints are a joke. Ask yourself this: what is the actual cost of the medical care you consume in a year? Maybe it's a good year. You have two doctors visits and some lab work. An hour of a doctors time is minimally $200. Throw in a receptionist and paying for the facility and his overhead, and it's $400 a visit. And the labwork? Probably another $600. So $1,400 - not bad. But maybe it's a bad year - 4 visits, 10 tests of various sorts, and a proceedure. That's about $12,000. Or maybe it's a *really* bad year, the year you burn through $40,000 of hospital care before kicking the bucket. Most years are good, a few are bad. So what to you would be a fair amount of money to spend per year on medical treatment, on average, to cover your lifetime use? Maybe you feel that that cost is simply too high for someone to afford. It is about choosing what we spend our money on, after all, and the average cost of an individual plan is $4,700. But just out of curiosity, what does your car insurance cost? The average nationwide is $1,837, and we don't hear too many people complaining or going without.

Given the fact that hospital costs are being driven up by emergancy room care for illegal immigrants, which in turn is spread onto the premiums of the insured, how is not covering illegal immigrants (insorfar as requiring insurance) going to help contain medical costs? Note that when a hospital negotiates a discounted rate for the poor and uninsured, illegal immigrants have a significantly higher rate of skipping out on the bill than do citizens who - though perhaps poor - are established in their communities and cannot just run from the creditors. Consequently, the expected discounted reimbursment from a citizen versus an illegal alien is higher. Or are you saying that the cost of uninsured illegal immigrants is negligible in comparison to the cost of treating the uninsured overall?

I'm not sure they are leaving in appreciable numbers, from what I've read. Rather, the influx has dropped off.

While I don't have the facts, I'm glad it's failing. The backdrop sounds like one big taxpayer-supported giveaway, with everybody and their brother shoving money at the project. All the subsidies and grants in the world won't turnaround a dying region with an inherently unfriendly business environment.

I find this discussion most remarkable by its absence. Here we are, supposedly so desperate to keep people working that we'll flush away a trillion dollars in future revenue on stimulus spending to artificially create jobs. At the same time, we undertake a trillion dollar health reform. But we are assured that it will pay for itself, we can just wring the money out of waste, paper-pushers, and middlemen. Well guess what? All of these paper-pushers have jobs and earn money. If we can somehow get rid of them - and arrive at some magical lean mean health-providing machine - then we have a bunch of unemployed people on our hands. How much will we require to 'stimulate' them with employment? I dunno - maybe roughly the amount we saved getting rid of them? Getting something for nothing is proving to be harder than Obama let on.

Are you kidding? Starting a contribution with "CHECK IT" is a great flag which makes filtering easier. I only wish certain other posters were as considerate.

Wow - free money! Look, all the regulatory fiddling in the world won't change the simple fact that if we are to move 50 million from the uninsured to the insured, we need to come up with about $200 billion a year. Every year. There is nothing magical about that number, it is simply 50 million times $4,000. You can put that number into whatever framework resonates with you: 1/3 of the total defense and intelligence budgets (less the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), a budget the size of Medicaid, or the sum of the budgets of the Dept's of Energy, HUD, DHS, NASA, the NSF, State, and other international spending. You can make the uninsured pay for their insurance themselves, or you can take it from the rich and out-voted. But $200 billion is a staggering outlay that won't vanish through hand-waving. Taking it through taxes is going to have an undeniable impact on our economy.

I'm as eager to think the worst of these clowns as the next guy, but let's put this to rest *until* somebody shows that it is significantly at odds with the statistics overall. Anecdotal info suggests that dealers as a whole are disporportionately republican donors. Has anybody done the grunt-work and checked it out?

Not his sex life, no - but a conflict of interest, yes. And if he has a relation with an FM exec it is absolutely a conflict of interest when by virtue of his position he is the de facto regulator. How is this different from the scandal at the Dept of the Interior? I was pretty skeptical about the accusation, but it appears to be true: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,432501,00.html

They should shut up and be happy they are not nationalized.

It is the new talking point. I heard him say it on the Dailey Show - even Jon Stewart was chuckling in disbelief before moving on to safer Bush bashing. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/14/b...y_n_231360.html

Maybe they are just nervous about the scrutiny. ACORN-supplied voting returns, nothing to see here folks.

This isn't the Congress you voted for?

Pyramid scemes are always invisible or ignored by the participants. But there will be congressional recriminations and indignation afterwards, rest assured.

Krauthammer has an interesting editorial which raises the question: with all the stimulus money that is being spent, much of it obstensively for nothing more than simply the sake of being spent and thereby stimulating the economy, why didn't we throw a few bucks NASA's way? That serves the same purpose as mowing the lawns of the Smithsonian, and might actually have some lasting benefit. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/...rgot_97498.html

Maybe those who thought that while a stimulus might be ok, what we were sold wasn't it. Here is a pie-chart comparison of what the two plans are spending their money on: http://www.chinaenvironmentallaw.com/2009/...kage-pie-chart/ Note that much of the China spending was planned anyway, and their deficit-to-GNP ratio is significantly smaller than ours. Adequate private capital (and the business friendly environment) makes China fertile ground for a private sector-driven recovery.

I dunno - were accomidations made to him so that he could compete on a level playing field, or were the outcomes voided until a dyslexic passed? That's the crux of the matter. Do we as a society mandate equal opportunity, or equality in outcome?

Sigh...

The courts reading of the constitution concluded that he was no longer president - that ousted the president. The military role was simply one of enforcement. If Iran nukes the White House but Pelosi is still around, show me the law which say's she can order a counter-strike. The same legal reasoning governs both situations. To GG's point, there is no ambiguity if you accept that the president's authority ceased immediately per Article 239. The Supreme Courts position is that under Article 242 (which I provided and bold-faced this very point) executive authority (ie lawfull duties) are passed first to the head of Congress and then to the head of the Supreme Court. No president in place means presidential authority and execution of his duties, including control of the military, is passed down the chain. The legality of using the military in enforcement of their warrant is reinforced by Article 272 which directs the military to preserve the Constitution and the rules governing changes in the presidency. So the army can be so directed, and in these circumstances the chain of authority fell to the Supreme Cout.

Then you are guilty of speed reading. It is fairly unanimously agreed (here and in the real world) that the expulsion appears illegal - indeed, if I'm not mistaken the constitution itself forbids that. What we have been arguing was (first) whether this a military coup, and (second, assuming it was civilian directed) whether or not the courts can legally order the military to remove a president, and if in fact if it is ever legal for the military to do so. I originally thought it a civilian coup and that the military was getting a bum rap, but am now of the opinion that the episode was entirely in accordance with the constitution (except possibly for the expulsion bit). DC Tom maintains that the removal was illegal and in particular the military can not be used to execute it.

Well, one man's blog is another man's seemingly researched and reasoned LA Times editorial by a US Federal Appeals Court nominee (successfully fillibustered by the Democrats) who by coincidence is Honduran and was a member of the US delegation to Zelaya's inaugeration. But if you want to give it the same weight as blogospheric PPP punditry then go ahead. Second, it's not the interpretation of the law but of the constitution which - he points out - is available in Spanish along with the other relevant documents on the Supreme Court website. Here it is in Spanish, followed by an english summary published by the Library of Congress prior to these events. http://pdba.georgetown.edu/Constitutions/H...ras/hond05.html http://countrystudies.us/honduras/84.htm While laws may be written they way you describe, constitutions are not. Tell me - what is the punishment defined in the US Constitution for the suspension of habeas corpus when invasion or public safety do not require it? It's not there. Nevertheless because of their history the Hondurans felt strong enough about constitutional manipulations that they went to great lengths to define it as treason and to specify the minimal actions to be taken: Here is a translation of Article 239: Apparently you feel that there is ambiguity about will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office. I can't help you there, but would point out that the arbitrator for the meaning and reach of the Honduran Constitution is... the Honduran Supreme Court. Here are some more useful bits touching on the legality of the courts use of the military to protect the constitution: As for your hypothetical question - life in jail for speeding would have to be applied consistently, and not be considered cruel and unusual punishment by the courts. What's your point?

You keep insisting it was a coup. According to the link, the constitution says he is guilty of treason and shall 'cease henceforth in his duties.' Presumably that means the leadership automatically flows along the lines of succession, to the VP (the office being vacated owing to a resignation) and then to the Speaker, who was formally sworn in a day or so later. So that leaves only the question of whether the Supreme Court can write an order to the military to arrest him and remove him from office. The link cites Article 272 as saying that the military must enforce compliance with the constitution, with particular respect to the laws of succession. So if the constitution say's he is immediately stripped of power and the position falls to the Speaker, and if it say's the military must enforce compliance with this, who ultimately gives the order to enforce compliance? It either has to be the Supreme Court or the Speaker. Your argument seems to rest on the ideas that (1) courts cannot issue arrest warrants, and (2) militaries cannot be tasked with carrying them out. The latter may be wrong in light of 272 (and it would be the Supreme Court itself that would decide that), and the former is certainly wrong here in the US and in a great many other countries as well

Far be it from me to defend government bureaucracy, but the Zoo's are not state entities. Their pedigree is worse: they belong to that special cauldron of self-entitlement known as the state-supported non-profit.

I dunno. Is everybody here too pig-headed to admit that their first instinct was wrong, and that when information on the Honduran constitution came to light the removal turned out to be exactly what was called for constitutionally?

And another analysis concluding much the same thing: http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/a...-democracy.aspx This one points out that saliant disconnect is between the US view of constitutionality which (by our constitution) permits any changes at all no matter how far reaching, versus certain other countries (such as post-Nazi Germany) which prohibits certain types of amendments.