Comments on: GREED

By: H3xx

H3xx — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 05:26:19 +0000

You win. Have a cookie.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 13:22:45 +0000

Considering the way things are now going, AIG (and taxpayers) got it easy, nowadays FED is giving 800 _billions_ now and 700 billions then to those “too big to fail” banks and Wall Street is having a party of their lifetimes again.

Guess who is left with the bill of that party?

(Hint: None of the participants nor the FED)

By: Steaming Pile

Steaming Pile — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:39:51 +0000

More than can be efficiently counted with current currency-counting machines. If you have to weigh it, I would say one ton of $100 bills equals one assload.

By: Steaming Pile

Steaming Pile — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:36:36 +0000

And THIS. How long is the average wait in Toronto (where about 1/3 of Canadians live) vs. East Bumfark Centre, Northwest Territories, where the nearest doctor lives an hour plane ride away? Canada is, IIRC, the second-largest nation on Earth by land area, and only has something like 30 million people, over 90% of whom live with an hour of the US border. I am sure that living in the wilderness means taking one’s life into one’s own hands just like any other country, including the US.

By: Steaming Pile

Steaming Pile — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:28:31 +0000

THIS.

By: ACSIS

ACSIS — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 03:27:18 +0000

Do you need everything explained to you? Do you need someone else to wipe your ass too?

By: Smartz

Smartz — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:31:55 +0000

” ‘Is Hussein Obama going to destroy America with his Atheistic Communist views?
Let’s face it people, with this new Spending bill he has, he’s really shaping up to be the worst president ever.

He’s for gay marriage, he’s pro abortion, he’s pro atheist and pro muslim, pro Communist (as shown with his new spending bill.) pro marijuana and he’s anti-christian and anti-good in general.’
I did a little cheer inside reading all that.I take it as further evidence that while I haven’t agreed with everything so far, we have put the right man in office!”

I am confused. What part of that did you “cheer inside” for?

By: Indie Tarheel

Indie Tarheel — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 14:30:07 +0000

Depends on the size of said ass, I suppose.

By: alleee

alleee — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 13:13:24 +0000

How many US Dollars in an “assload?”

By: ACSIS

ACSIS — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:22:46 +0000

@Seth
I don’t doubt the results of the studies as you’ve represented them. My comments to MLD and FaileV weren’t meant as any kind of evidence of anything.
.
I’m 100% for providing healthcare access to everyone. I would think that would be at least one major factor in why your study comes out the way it does. With the current healthcare system in the US, so many people don’t have access to any kind of real healthcare due to lack of insurance that little problems become big problems before they even try to see anyone. The Canadian system may not be perfect, but at least it doesn’t turn people away the way our system does.
.
As part of a new system, I’d love to see more ‘health management’ so we’d have less need of disease and injury treatment down the road.

By: Johnathan

Johnathan — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:13:52 +0000

In fairness we have an awesome pharmaceutical research industry. Sure stuff is pricey, sure we develop sixteen (thousand) different kinds of ED meds, but we’ve done a nice job of developing drugs used around the world. Just food for thought

By: ACSIS

ACSIS — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:12:26 +0000

Ok. I was originally responding to MLD’s response to FaileV and in the context of those two posts, I believe my post was relevant.
Seth’s response to me, which I admit I took personally, took us into a new direction. He was wrong if he was trying to say I was against a National Healthcare system, and I just wanted to make that clear.

By: Seth

Seth — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:05:46 +0000

I was lying (in a way). I don’t have any friends in Canada that
I’ve seen in twenty years. They were from BC. But we never actually talked about health care. I totally have a friend who has friends in Canada, does that count? Sorry for the implication that you were being dishonest, ACSIS. I really have heard the same argument so many times it has become ridiculous, whether it is true in either case or not. Sure, ‘anecdotal’ is a KIND of evidence, just not a VALID kind. Reputable studies have shown, again and again, that health OUTCOMES, measurable outcomes, mind you, are better in countries with socialized medicine, and that we pay more than anyone in the world for our mediocre results. [LINK] in my name. Or just google ‘health care outcomes by country’

By: NinjaPacman

NinjaPacman — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:05:02 +0000

This is not Livejournal. Quit with the whiny captions.

By: Danbala

Danbala — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:40:52 +0000

Oh, and I also have a private health insurance, so I could’ve gotten about half of that money back. I couldn’t really be bothered with filling out the papers for $100 though. I’m lazy like that. :/

By: froofrou

froofrou — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:39:32 +0000

*keeps thinking that she’s got some kick-ass insurance*

By: Danbala

Danbala — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:19:04 +0000

Not too nice, that. :/
.
Mind you, we have a 32% income tax here, so … We pay for it too. It just doesn’t end up being as big a blow when something completely unexpected like that happens. Then again, our education is free too, so all in all I think I have so far gotten more out of the system than I’ve put into it. I hope I won’t have to o many reasons to cost more money in the years to come, though…

By: Jane St.Clair

Jane St.Clair — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:08:16 +0000

Well, I can’t speak for Seth, the only point I was trying to make is that we don’t really resolve anything by sharing second hand stories back and forth. I don’t think you, or your friends, are lying. However, individual cases can not be used as proof of the system as a whole. I don’t feel that the general consensus was that the waiting periods are longer in Canada, in fact, many of the posters have said they wait just as long for non-emergency procedures here in the states. Until one of us does the homework and researches some statistics we’re pretty much at an impasse. All I can say is that as someone who currently has no insurance it is very stressful to constantly be making hard choices. Do I pay the money to go to the doctor to renew the prescription on my inhaler or do I run the risk of having an asthma attack and being rushed to the emergency room and having to pay several thousand dollars. When I had pink eye a couple weeks ago I had to dip into my savings (which I was hoping would get me through the summer, since my second job has cut back on hours) to pay for the doctor visit because I couldn’t go back to the school I was doing my student teaching at unless I had put antibiotic drops in my eyes for at least 24 hours. And I’m one of the lucky ones, I know my parents would help me out if I was really in a bind. So many people don’t have insurance and don’t have the means to pay for these doctor visits. I would take a little bit of wait time if it meant I didn’t have to choose between which yearly check I should skip, the gyno or the eye doctor.

By: ACSIS

ACSIS — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:59:38 +0000

I’m sorry, I just re-read my original post on this and there’s a line missing.
I’m sure I typed it, but I must have un-done it or somehow
deleted it. The post should have read (missing line in bold):

I have several divorced Canadian friends who live and work in the states. They bring their kids to the states for all non-emergency medical treatments.
They give two reasons for this:
They can get the appointments. The quality of medical/dental care in the states is superior.

By: ACSIS

ACSIS — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:51:28 +0000

That’s fine, and I wouldn’t have taken issue with what Seth said save for the implication that I (or others who say something similar to what I did) was lying and was against a National Healthcare system.
.
I wasn’t lying and I assume neither of you are either. There’s really no need to. I don’t have first hand experience with Canada’s healthcare system, so was simply relating what I’ve heard many times from these people. So far, no one up here seems to be disputing the potential for really long waiting periods, and the general consensus seem to be that it’s worse in Canada than in the US.
As to their comments on the quality, it’s their opinion and that’s all it was presented as. I’m not trying to claim it as fact.

By: rhorho

rhorho — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:31:21 +0000

LOL! Try everything once, as they say…

By: Jane St.Clair

Jane St.Clair — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:20:32 +0000

Well, this is always the problem with anecdotal evidence. Seth’s right in that for every friend you have that says Canada’s health care sucks the person who is arguing for it will have one that says it doesn’t. My sister-in-law is from a small town north of Toronto and she hates living in the states and having to use my brother’s insurance plan. If she could have gone home to have my neice she would have.

By: Jane St.Clair

Jane St.Clair — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:18:06 +0000

I want to cry. I just paid more than that to see the eye doctor and get contacts. Then they had the nerve to tell me that I shouldn’t be ordering two boxes of contacts because I’m so near-sighted that I have a higher risk of my cornea ripping at the edges and I really need to come in once a year. I’m like, really, are you going to do me pro bono cause if not I don’t have the money to come in once a year.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:34:44 +0000

There are evils of marijuana?!?
-
LSD? Welcome to 2009, there are much worse things to worry about.
-
I like the part about the Crusades against Christianity. I know that’s the first thing I thought of when I read the details of the stimulus package!
-
We DEFINATELY elected the right man for the job! The country is going to be downright FUN in just one term!!

By: Danbala

Danbala — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:29:45 +0000

…and after having paid that much, I of course had free health care for a year (from the date I was hospitalised). Medicins for the next halfyear did cost me about $3/month. (Warfarin and stuff like that.)

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:28:11 +0000

You can’t compare health care in rural regions with that in urban populations. The simple fact is that more patients = more money. The bigger populations also offer a larger number of physicians living amongst that population. I would assume that even a socialized health care system would pay it’s physicians based on the volume of patients they care for…perhaps I assume too much.

By: dissimilitude

dissimilitude — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:27:16 +0000

Old story from some years ago; a guy I knew was finally, after a long wait, able to get his buddy taken back to see a doc in the ER after going up to a nurse and asking “If you can’t get to him right away, can you at least let me borrow a mop and a bucket so nobody slips in the blood?” (Disclaimer: I’m really not sure this would work anymore, at least not in an urban area. They’d actually give you a mop instead.)

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:24:11 +0000

A broken nose pouring blood onto the waiting room floor won’t even get you in to a doctor in 20 minutes, you’d have to cut an arm off or something serious!
-
I was really hoping if I made enough of a mess they would just get me in so I could get pain meds, but my plan was foiled. They gave me a wad of gauze and told me to bleed on that instead!

By: dissimilitude

dissimilitude — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:54:59 +0000

Sweet. Jesus. I had to have a needle biopsy last year, and the copay just for that was $400 because it counts as “outpatient surgery”. And overall, I have pretty good coverage. I guess if I’d had to do what you went through it would all be covered after my $750 hospital copay, but I’d run out of sick days before the three weeks was up, for sure.

By: ACSIS

ACSIS — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:43:11 +0000

Finally, FSTDT started responding again so I could grab this quote which was taken from a Yahoo Answers entry:
.

Is Hussein Obama going to destroy America with his Atheistic Communist views?
Let’s face it people, with this new Spending bill he has, he’s really shaping up to be the worst president ever.

He’s for gay marriage, he’s pro abortion, he’s pro atheist and pro muslim, pro Communist (as shown with his new spending bill.) pro marijuana and he’s anti-christian and anti-good in general

.
I did a little cheer inside reading all that. I take it as further evidence that while I haven’t agreed with everything so far, we have put the right man in office!
.
.
The rest of the Yahoo entry went like this:

I predict that in his first term he will legalize the evils of marijuana, gay marriage, LSD and in 4 years so many people will have been turned atheist by him that abolishing Christianity will become one of his campaign platforms. He will win the elections and Christians wichip edrounded up, thrown in jail and upon release we will be micro chiped to make sure we don’t worship the lord and repeat offenders will be killed. Sound crazy? Well his new spending bill disguised as a stimulus package shows that he’s about to turn us in to comunists.

.
Paranoid, delusional, isolationist, masochistic rantings of a self-described majority ‘victim’. [Link]

By: Danbala

Danbala — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:30:00 +0000

It was a very slow day. They were about as amazed as I was. They’d barely had time to finish the triage. ;p

By: ACSIS

ACSIS — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:26:19 +0000

Location, location, location.
.
In a city in which I used to live, Kaiser seriously sucked. It’s the worst and everyone hates it. Go to any of the slightly smaller towns to the east, and people love Kaiser there. My guess is that Kaiser is saturated in the city and simply can’t live up to it’s obligations.
Maybe the health care in your area sucks too and that’s why your friends love their Canadian system better. Maybe they’re all from somewhere in Canada where there is no waiting period and doctors are well paid so the best ones flock there.
.
Some of my Canadian friends/coworkers are from rural Manitoba, very rural Ontario and areas around Montreal and Ottawa.
.

By: dissimilitude

dissimilitude — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:10:36 +0000

You got to see a doctor in an emergency room in 20 minutes?? I can’t even begin to imagine how you’d do that here (unless you were without a pulse or quickly losing blood). I think 5 hours is about the minimum wait time in the ER’s in my city.

By: Seth

Seth — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:09:10 +0000

Well, the thing is, you may be telling the truth. But I have friends in Canada, too, and all of them claim that America’s health care system sucks, they would never use it, and they are very happy with the health care system they have. What province are your friends from? Mine are from BC. Maybe it depends on location?

By: ACSIS

ACSIS — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:05:28 +0000

If you want to call me a liar, please come right out and say it.
If you want to accuse me of being against socialized medicine, please come right out and say it.
.
I’m neither lying nor against a properly run health care system. The men I’m speaking of are both paid very well, and have very good insurance through their jobs.
.
My comment addressed two issues that I’ve heard about from them and other Canadians (yeah, I know more than two – shocker I know).
They have better luck getting appointments here in the states, and they feel that the quality of care they and their children get here is far superior to what they could get ‘back home’.
.
If you really want to use either of those two points to make it seem like I’m against turning our health care system inside out and making it affordable and available to everyone, have at it. You’ll fail.

By: Danbala

Danbala — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:49:15 +0000

Oh, and to add to that – last year when I had a deep vein trombosis, lung embolism, and worryingly low blood values I ended up hospitalised for one wekk, and went through several -scopies and -graphies to rule out causes for my problems. It ended up costing me about $200 (plus the difference between sick money and my salary for three weeks).

By: Seth

Seth — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:44:55 +0000

I’ve hard that story so many times from so many people. It seems that everyone who is against socialized medicine has friends in Canada, and those friends always have to come to the states for treatment. Weird.

By: Danbala

Danbala — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:44:53 +0000

I live in a country with a fairly socialised health care system, and the same thing is true here – the waiting times vary a lot. An emergency appointment you can almost always get the same day*, if you call to for instance have a suspect skin thing (mole, etc.) checked, it’ll be more like a couple of weeks. To get sent on to a “remove skin things”-specialist after that can take a few months, after a g.p. has made sure it’s not malign. This is the health centre where I go. We have others in this same city that have twice, thrice those times.
.
If it is a life threatening emergency (or at least fairly severe), you just go to the regular emergency room and wait – that has taken any time from 20 minutes to five hours for me (from arrival to actually seeing a doctor who’s specialised in my ailment).
.
*) That varies with the level of emergency. If I have massive lumbago problems and call my health care centre thingie in the afternoon I’ve gotten a time the next day – it’s not exactly life threatening.

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:44:42 +0000

Not to mention some of those procedures with a “long wait” would be completely out of financial reach of families without any insurance. Waiting for it is better than not getting it at all in my opinion.

By: dissimilitude

dissimilitude — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:34:55 +0000

I will note that in the US, even with private insurance, the accessibility of timely non-emergency care varies wildly. My regular doc, or my kids’? I can usually get an appointment within the month. Specialists, not so much. One of my daughters saw a pediatric endocrinologist for a couple of years and that was a nightmare. They would, with a perfectly straight face, inform you that the next available appointment was 6 to 8 months away, no choice of time/date, and then when you got there you could count on spending 3 to 4 hours waiting (assuming you were on time) for about 5 minutes with the doctor. Quite honestly,
my dentist also never has openings for 4 to 5 months (but will put you on the “cancellation list”…not much help if you’re in pain. He doesn’t make me wait like that once I get in, though!)

By: ACSIS

ACSIS — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:20:04 +0000

I have several divorced Canadian friends who live and work in the states. They bring their kids to the states for all non-emergency medical treatments.
They can get the appointments. The quality of medical/dental care in the states is superior.

By: PortlandMark

PortlandMark — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:59:59 +0000

For elective surgeries and non emergency items, yes. However, when you’re sick, or injured, you walk in, get seen, and go home without impoverishing your family. Who cares if there’s a six month wait to get a boob job?

By: FaileV

FaileV — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:49:19 +0000

oh yes it has problems, but overall the system took better care of more people. I think the biggest problem is the capitalized system leads to US medicine being top tier, but US healthcare is then so expensive we just can’t afford it.
I’m not militant about it, i am worried about losing my military benefits at 25 but i don’t know enough about healthcare to offer a good solution.

By: Realism

Realism — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:48:17 +0000

Except it’s true. It’s well-known that with almost any socialized business (medicine being a business), Supply/Demand becomes exponentially skewed, leading to insurmountable wait times for consumers (patients).

By: Steaming Pile

Steaming Pile — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:22:54 +0000

Know any?

Seriously, that lie has been around and around so much, it’s beginning to look like one of those urban legends like the one where Bill Clinton had Vince Foster whacked. How about you take off your tinfoil hat and join the rest of us in Realityland.

By: Mr.Wholesome

Mr.Wholesome — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:13:27 +0000

There’s a good reason Obama hired so many of Clinton’s ex-cabinet. It’s because they had their shit together, they cut waste and not only fixed the deficit but created a surplus. These are the people we need to set things straight while spending unheard of sums of money. I doubt they’ll cut the deficit in half in three years like Obama has said but they’ll probably cut it by a quarter and possibly have a surplus in a decade if another Progressive follows Obama.

By: Generic&Tonic

Generic&Tonic — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:45:10 +0000

this is what is both amazing and wrong (amongst other things, like the
free stuff we give away to illegal aliens and non-citizens) with US health care.

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/003794.html

Get rid of any idea of socialized medicine helping anyone. Take the governments
hand out of the markets.

By: MLD

MLD — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:36:22 +0000

agree

By: MLD

MLD — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:35:26 +0000

Yes and no. In Canada, you can wait MONTHS for non-emergent MRI or CT scans. Canadians have come HERE for things like that. And I’ve had friends in Britain unable to receive the mental health treatment (for Major Depressive Disorder) that they critically needed.

A lot of it sucks, but the other countries have flaws too. Militant proponents of socialised medicine fail to point that out (and I am a proponent, but it’s something that needs care in implementation).

By: Steaming Pile

Steaming Pile — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:23:00 +0000

My last front-page lol was titled, “TEENAGE DRIVERS,” and featured Miley Cyrus flashing her new driver’s license from the driver’s seat of the Porsche Cayenne she got for her birthday. I didn’t think that one was particularly funny, either, but people kept favoriting it.