I'm 100% on board with @MaxWilder. @Yogi, and @ghark seem to be falling into the same trap the tea party is falling in. By using your ideological base to hold your party hostage, you make your party less electable with the centrists. Right now, the centrists run this country, and Obama is our CEO.

To paraphrase Obama, "if we were to start from scratch, single-payer is the way to go, but we aren't starting from scratch." I agree, and in fact almost everybody agrees, there is little in this bill to effectively control costs. This bill is more about the moral imperative, not the financial one. It makes healthcare obtainable for more people, and it ensures that the people paying for coverage receive it. That is, it focuses more on the "quality and availability of care" problem, than the "cost of care" problem.

There is a very good reason for this. The cost issue is trickier to deal with.

On one hand you have the single payer direction. How do you do that? Presumably you just start offering medicare for everybody, which in effect means raising taxes substantially to pay for it. Remember, we just got out of a recession. Politically, nobody can stomach more taxes. Granted, in theory, everyone should receive a commensurate pay raise for the insurance they were previously receiving. If you thought that was going to happen... well... I think I've got a bridge that can get over that ocean for you...

On the other hand, you have the public option. In effect, that's making medicare optional for everyone. Well, if you talk to anyone in the medical industry, they'll tell you that medicare under-compensates. They don't cover the cost of care, and doctors are forced to subsidize that care by over charging patients with private insurance. Many doctors stop accepting medicare for exactly this reason. This puts you in a pickle. You can either A) force doctors to accept medicare, or B) reduce the availability of care to medicare subscribers. Of course, this is a false choice. Option A causes doctors to operate at a loss, which discourages entry into the medical profession more generally, and results in consequence B. Government price controls result in supply-demand imbalances. This is well documented.

If you really want to control costs, the best (maybe only) way is to lower the barriers to entry to the medical profession. Becoming a doctor should be a less costly endeavor, and doctors shouldn't be the only ones providing care. Nurses and technicians can do much of what is currently on the doctor's plate. Routine prescription renewals, diagnoses of common illnesses, and basic preventative tests could all be handled by people that didn't spend ten years and hundreds of thousands of dollars becoming a practicing doctor. Also, the creation of medical schools should be heavily subsidized. If you increase the number of care providers, the costs will come down.

The other aspects of costs are lawsuits, and medical technology (e.g. pharma, medtronic, etc). Dealing with lawsuits is hard, but one way to do it is to push liability to the people actually providing the care (like those nurses and techs, not the deep pockets), and make sure that the person getting the care understands the risks involved and signs waivers. That is where the dems are weakest because of their close ties to the ABA. With medical technology, we've got bigger problems that really have to do with overhauling our deeply flawed system of intellectual property in this country (and protectionist tendencies surrounding it). I agree, it's ridiculous that titanium screws cost 8k just because they go in your spine, or that 10 cents worth of pills can cost $600, but dealing with that is another whole TL;DR.

>> ^shagen454:

This makes me feel some empathy for them; but it's not strong enough to deviate my taste buds from having a big cheesy tuna melt with pickles.


Aw, poor fishy -- GET IN MY BELLY!

This makes me feel some empathy for them; but it's not strong enough to deviate my taste buds from having a big cheesy tuna melt with pickles.

Your video, QI - Pickled Toe Anyone?, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Oh yeah there is quite a few.
In reply to this comment by Hybrid:
Ha, and did you find one?
In reply to this comment by ctrlaltbleach:
I dont know why its so horribly fascinating that I had to go find a video of people drinking it.
In reply to this comment by Hybrid:
Thanks for the promote! It looked like it was getting totally ignored before
In reply to this comment by ctrlaltbleach:
*promote

I dont know why its so horribly fascinating that I had to go find a video of people drinking it.
In reply to this comment by Hybrid:
Thanks for the promote! It looked like it was getting totally ignored before
In reply to this comment by ctrlaltbleach:
*promote

I can't sleep when I think about the times we're living in,
I can't sleep when I think about the future I was born into,
Outsiders dressed up like Sunday morning,
With no Berlin wall what the hell you gonna do.

(Chorus:)
It's a New Year,
I'm glad to be here
It's a fresh spring,
So let's sing.

In 2080
I'll surely be dead
So don't look ahead,
Never look ahead

It's a New Year,
I'm glad to be here
It's the first spring,
So let's sing.

And the moon shines bright
On the water tonight
So we won't drown
In the summer sound.

If you find me I'll be sitting by the water fountain,
Picket signs, letdowns, meltdown it's Monday morning
But it's alright, it's alright, it's alright, it's alright
It's alright,
Cause in no time, They'll be gone I guess I'll still be standing here.

(Chorus)

(Bridge:)
Yeah Yeah we can all grab at the chance and be handsome farmers,
Yeah you can have twenty one sons and be blood when they marry my daughters,
And the pain that we left at the station will stay in a jar behind us.
We can pickle the pain into blue ribbon winners at county contests.

(Chorus)

(Bridge)

It's nice to bike to work and fart less to save Ma Earth, but when you start with the global one-world taxes and warming data falsification to seize more power (and stealing credit from the sun for heating earth), that's a real pickle.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Arlo Guthrie, Alices Restaurant, Motorcycle, Pickle, 70s' to 'Arlo Guthrie, Alices Restaurant, Motorsickle, Pickle, 70s' - edited by calvados

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Don't be a dill. >> ^Yogi:

>> ^dag:
Heather Gherkin is my kind of Law professor.

The kind named after a pickle.

>> ^dag:

Heather Gherkin is my kind of Law professor.


The kind named after a pickle.

>> ^peggedbea:

i honestly will never understand people's spider/insect/snake phobias.
but then again, i'm afriad of pickles and mayonaisse.


People with a fear of spiders are less likely to be killed by spiders. Those whack arthropods will bite you, old school.

>> ^peggedbea:

i honestly will never understand people's spider/insect/snake phobias.
but then again, i'm afriad of pickles and mayonaisse.


Rational and Irrational phobias, spiders/snakes/insects are potentially dangerous, it's hard to tell which are and aren't.

I've got a weird quasi-phobia of these things - spiders, anything larger than a £2 coin I don't like being on me. Anything smaller than that no problem. However, I don't mind it near me, or just being where I can see it.

Snakes, don't mind at all, wouldn't be keen on ones with nasty bites or poison however.

Insects, fine with the ones I know are safe and don't nip ya.

These all seem like rational phobias to me, unlike pickles and mayonnaise which seem kinda irrational to me...unless a pickle tried to drown you in a vat of mayonnaise you may as well have a phobia of something like the sound oranges make or the inside of envelopes.

i honestly will never understand people's spider/insect/snake phobias.

but then again, i'm afriad of pickles and mayonaisse.

I ate something similar to that last week, It was called a "Trucker Burger" it consisted of, a 1/4pound (before cooking) burger patty, a fried egg, two slices of back bacon and a fist full of lettuce and whatever sauces you want, as well as pickles onions and the tomatoes. This thing was fucking massive. I bring it up because I understand how it would be to eat such a burger if you where buying it from a street vendor you would want to find yourself a corner or ally to hide your face while you smoosh it into your talking orifice.

HOW can one respectably eat one of those in public, hahahahha.

too much mayo, in my opinion, but the avocado and other ingredients are mouth watering.