Accuracy is not your strong suit I see. I log in here when I have a few moments or having lunch,when I am not traveling,etc. But that aside. One of the upsides to growing a business is that we have a staff.
VP's..middle managers. People who are paid to do the heavy lifting. It's nice making money and not have to work 14 hours a day. I get to choose when and what I do.

I don't drink tea. I am not a master of the universe nor do I play one on the internet.
You are not a consultant. The board is a consultant. Listening to people that are on the other side of important issues is educational. My job requires that I have to be aware of things that don't necessarily affect me. No one that works here will ever talk honestly with me. That's the nature of the beast.

Sadly your post history is not up for debate. As all can be easily verified by a simple search on your posting. I was simply referencing that observation in regards to these sort of threads and their past outcome. Specifically, that most (not your friends) do not agree with your view point.

Duely noted fine sire.

Thank you for clearing that up top notch.

Nor ever claimed to be.

Ah ok. So you're here to be educated by the GFY masses on the topic of the day. Fair enough.

:pimp

If it is going to cost a trillion to save them, maybe it is time to die.


Wow; I thought you had been around a while. Minte has; friendships were made. Would you drop them all once you succeeded?

Last post for the morning..we are open and I have things to do. If I am available I will stop by at lunch.

True..my post history is easy to verify. 5400ish posts over 10+ years.

When you give advice it's typically considered to be consulting. So I will keep that in mind if I ever find the need for a GFY consultant.

When the time comes that logging in to GFY isn't worth my time or the makeup of people posting here has changed to the point that it's nothing but abusive I will be history.
Until that day arrives, if people don't want to discuss issues they will ignore me and I will get the message then Con Ti Partiro.

Minte are you near Leinenkugel Brewing Company? Our next wi trip to see my wifes family we want to go there,was curious if you ever went? Their Leinenkugel's Berry Weiss is sooooooooo good.

I think its time to go to socialized medicine as a baseline. You want to pay for a better plan great. I read an article in Harvard business and that is was time for universal coverage of some type and that from the business stand point it makes sense. Minte shouldnt have to be worrying about coverage when his competitors overseas dont.
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/06/heal..._good_for.html

The Old system was terrible. Obamacare as it is will not be the answer.
Does anyone actually believe a single payer system with true data mining on a massive scale isn't on the horizon?
The real question is how far on the horizon it is...
My estimate is no more than 12 years away.

You completely missed the point.

Thank you for clearing that up top notch.

Obama, and those supporting it have all conceded or admitted that it's a "step in the right direction". Not the magic bullet.

:2 cents:

The "old system" was fine.

You got sick you went to the doctor and you paid for it. I even paid for an appendectomy for my stepson in 1985 out of my pocket (and I was just a musician playing in bands at nightclubs...the operation and hospital stay was $3500 complete).

It's the "new system" that is fucked up.

Once companies started being required to carry all sorts of insurance for people, and doctors started getting sued for astronomical amounts and also were required to carry all kinds of insurance...THAT is when the price of health care went through the roof over the last 20 years.

In my opinion from what I've seen in my lifetime, INSURANCE companies are a major part of the problem.
I lived my childhood in Fla. near Tampa. Nobody we knew had health insurance. Everybody just went to the doctor and/or hospital if needed and paid for it.

I lived my young adult life in Miami/Ft. Lauderdale in the 1980's Same thing.

But somewhere around the late 1980's I read all kinds of articles in Newsweek and Time about rising health care costs and what was causing it.

And today in 2012...if you go to the doctor it's a big deal financially.

My wife had a sinus infection a month ago. Doctor prescribed an antibiotic to kill it. A week later it came back. So he needed to prescribe a different antibiotic. Which he did and it worked....BUT, he also had her get a CAT scan of her sinuses to make sure.

Did she need the CAT scan? No. Our doctor and his wife are friends of ours as well as just my doctor. And he told me that his malpractice insurance pretty much forces him to order that CAT scan of her sinuses even though he already knows it's not needed!

That's the kind of thing that drives up costs (that and the fact that the big pharmaceutical companies price gouge the U.S. citizens by charging 2 and 3 times the cost of medications as compared to the rest of the world)

So the answer that our career politicians in Congress came up with and was approved by the President?
MORE INSURANCE FOR EVERYONE!!!

Pure genius. :disgust

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration unleashed a surge of deregulation. By 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act lay repealed. Banks could commingle with insurance companies at will. Ceilings on interest rates vanished. Banks could open branches anywhere. Unsurprisingly, the most highly educated returned to banking and finance. By 2005, the share of workers in the finance industry with a college education exceeded that of other industries by nearly 20 percentage points. By 2006, pay in the financial sector was again 70 percent higher than wages elsewhere in the private sector. A third of the 2009 Princeton graduates who got jobs after graduation went into finance; 6.3 percent took jobs in government.

Then the financial industry blew up, taking out a good chunk of the world economy.

Fitty disasters:2 cents:

Top notch? Explain that.

Hopefully not a disastor. But that idea of having to actually pay for these things didn't seem to have a lot of impact on the voters last month.

I think people forgot that there are no free lunches.

No.

I think that GOVERNMENTS and politicians need to understand this concept more so. The average Joe piss ant does not have much control in government spending and the economy. Where as the governments who are spending insanely beyond their means driving the country and world economy to collapse is what is at fault here.

That said, I concede that unless you're willing to PAY FOR IT, there needs to be some tough love for this country. If you want to go to war, you're kid should be the first one standing in line for a draft, and there should be a war tax. That way everyone feels it, and pays attention to what the government is doing.

If the entire country had skin in the game, there would not be any 10+ year wars, and 800+ military bases. If every time you had to build a new prison, there had to be a new tax to pay for it, you would see a closer eye paid to the department of corrections in this country. You would stop warehousing our citizens for nonsense.

That is just the tip of the iceberg, but I digress.

:2 cents:

Unfortunately the politicians would score political points by only making 1 percent of the country (the wealthiest) pay for it. :(

If everybody had to pay fairly for everything the govt. does...the govt. would be what it is supposed to be: small and unobtrusive in people's lives.

Instead, I feel like I work for the govt. And they have so many laws and rules that I can't get out of the bed first thing in the morning without accidentally breaking some kind of stupid law.

well said :thumbsup

I don't understand how anyone can miss the common sense detail that if there are more hands (insurance company) in the cookie jar the costs can only go up...

Can anyone spell out how exactly requiring health insurance will reduce costs?

Crabs in a barrel.

Now you're cooking with gas champ. :thumbsup

....and yet the sheeple keep whining and crying for more government involvement and laws.

:disgust

It would be more efficient if the banks or hedge funds controlled the wars...
Make it result based and then publish a list f potential targets that banks or hedge funds could bid on...
It would serve a nice warning to whoever breaks international laws and causes issues (for our oil imports )

in 2012 40,000 new laws went into effect, no happy hours in Utah, safer golf carts in Georgia, in Illinois People convicted of first-degree murder must be added to a new public database, similar to the sex offender registry, when they're released from prison or any other facility. "Are there that many murderers getting out of prison that it's a problem?"

Chippewa Falls is up in the northern part of the state. I am down south. Before you get close to leaving for your trip, let me know when you are there. It's a short flight for me and there is a good airport there. If I am available then, I'd be good for lunch.

Cool I will do that.It will probably be in the late spring early summer. I will let you know.

If everyone had insurance then the people who get treated "for free" are covered. the Dr, hospital etc doesn't have to chase a person that is not going to pay and be out of pocket in an inefficient way.

Accounts receivable are a drain on the current system.

Getting treated "for free" is a myth, only people that get treated for free are the poor, who won't buy insurance anyway, they will get free hookups from the government... which we will all pay for anyway, so it's not clear at all how this setup benefits anyone except the insurance companies...

if healthcare costs $1 trillion for the US now, it will cost $1 trillion (or more) after people buy insurance, costs will not magically go down, it's not possible for combined costs to go down because there is a 3rd party (insurance companies) that will take bigger chunk of the $1 trillion industry... so the costs have to go up... the only detail that is changing is who will pay for these healthcare costs..

another way to look at this is:
will insurance companies make more $$ now? They have more customers, so it's 100% clear that they will have same or higher profits... no?

now ponder this: where will these profits come from? who will pay for it?

:thumbsup:thumbsup

We have the ability to data mine 300 million patients for information about every illness, disease, medication and side-effect. It can't be done for legitimate privacy issues regarding dropped coverage, preexisting conditions, employment etc... A lot of that is changing now thanks to Obamacare but not all of it.

When we have full data aggregation and can drill down through the case histories of 300 million people along with genetic testing we will be able to determine markers for illnesses and medications based on other successfully treated patients with nearly or exactly the same patient history as your own. The future of medicine on a cost basis and a success basis is dependent on moving away from general practice toward a model of personal care that is based on your specific genetics, your specific case history, and tremendously more effective efficiency.

It will be cheaper and far better than any for profit insurance based system will ever be at the basic care level. :2 cents:

Single Payer all the way. It's the most efficient and cost effective system. And for-profit health insurance is only good for the ones selling it.

http://www.jflan.net/mayday/m2008/huck1may.gif

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. -Ben Franklin

Sooner or later everyone has to pay. The US government is running a 1 trillion yearly deficit has a 16.4 trillion debt. The "middle class" taxes go up on Jan 1st.

Obama's demand that the top bracket go up on those earning over 250k raises 50 billion dollars - enough to fund the government for about a week.

It's not a tax problem but a spending problem.

Some how Obama has managed to convince people that if only they squeeze and tax the 'rich' (who already pay half the taxes) then everything will be fine.

This is a lie of course and Obama is just a political hack for a political party that seeks to hold power.

People will always vote to raise someone elses taxes. Class warfare works. America has become a Mobocracy. The takers will keep voting to take.

But the politicians like Obama can only lie for so long until the true cost of their big government becomes apparent. That comes either through everyone paying higher taxes and the true cost of big government being felt and seen by the average person.

Obamacare was another big lie and written by the health insurance companies who are now cashing in and raising premiums.

Obamacare is over 2000 pages and most of it has to be figured out how to be implemented by HHS. There will be thousands of new rules and regulations weighing down employers. Most of it comes into effect in 2013 and 2014 is when the waivers for Obama's corporate donors expire and the true horrors of this legislation will be seen for what it is.

30 State governors have already rightly refused to setup state based exchanges and want nothing to do with it. This will be a complete disaster just wait and see. Unfortunately the economy and the average person will suffer greatly.

No it isn't. The answer to a big government broken system is not ANOTHER big government broken system. Total and utter fallacy if you think singe payer is the answer. In fact it will be far worse and far more expensive than anything before it.

despite what you've been lead to believe, US healthcare is the best in the world.
take your country for example. The news stories on how "improved" your wait times are should embarrass you into silence on this subject.

exactly right

Single payer healthcare is the new battle cry for those that don't want to pay their own way now that the obamacare battle cry has come and failed. Want to cure healthcare, stop giving it away for free. Can't pay, die.
Then perhaps people would stop buying iphones and "designer sneakers" and start buying healthcare. We are weak as a country because we've wasted tens if not hundreds of trillions on society's bottom.