The President's Address to a joint session of Congress 9/9/09 - Page 9

I debated telling you this, but money market accounts are technically mutual funds and hence are tied to the market.

Im sure my boss just bought a new helicopter thanks to you.

Are you serious? My accountant does not agree with me about staying away from Wall Street, and this has been an ongoing argument, so I'm not surprised. I mean, it's small time (meaning: your boss bought a toy helicopter thanks to me) but it's the principle of the thing. I may well just put my retirement funds in municipal bonds or something, if I even can.

I don't have cable and both my jobs preclude me being near the radio most of the day. I haven't listened to Glenn Beck since he went off the deep end and catch so very little of Rush that I couldn't tell you what he says.

I didn't cherry pick anything, I understand that private insurance companies ration care. However I don't wish to trade that for a government entity that does. I'd prefer to address and fix the actual problem.

As for waiting periods under our current plan I'm not sure what you are referring to. If I need an MRI I can get one within the next hour not the next month. If I needed chemotherapy I could begin it within the next week not the next four months. If I needed surgery for, let's say breast cancer, I could get it within the week or month not the next fourteen months.

But that does serve as an illustration that there are better alternatives out there. Anyone under the age of 35 who thinks they're going to get even a 1 to 1 return on investment with social security is mistaken.

Call your accountant and ask if your money market is FDIC insured. If it is, that means its just a savings account that the bank calls a "money market" to attract new business.

If its not, then its an investment, and your money is spread across commercial paper issued by your friends Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Citibank. The Primary Reserve money market fund had a shitload of Lehman Brother paper in it, which is why last September it broke the buck (went below $1/share).

Also, you cant (shouldnt) use municipal bonds in a retirement account as the tax free benefit is negated due to the fact that your retirement account is tax deferred and fully taxable upon withdrawl. Also, your three amigos listed above underwrite those municipal bonds, so theyre still getting paid.

When will you humans learn that you cannot get away from us!

Awesome.

http://www.actblue.com/entity/fundraisers/19079

Let's be clear here: you are wrong and stupid, or else disingenuous as hell. Please acknowledge this.

This reminds me: Canada Savings Bonds go on sale again next month.

True story time. My mom just broke her arm. She had immediate treatment, but she needed some surgery to repair the bone. Total wait time at the best hospital in the province for orthopedic surgery: five days. Cost: $0.

That's the kind of creeping decay we're dealing with up here in Socialism Land, aka Canada.

TzuDoNim: You are stupid and wrong, or else disingenuously lying. Please acknowledge this.

Rich and not rich white people want V.I.P. Five day waits are for lazy people and Mexicans.

Fixed.

That's something that people who are comfortable with that risk should be able to do IMO.

Catastrophic health insurance isn't for everyone - however a gov't guarantee to cover catastrophic occurrences could, IN THEORY, really drop the price of insurance.

I doubt that it would end up that way in practice.

Wouldn't denying illegal immigrants emergency medical care go against the Hippocratic Oath? Just a thought.

The wait time, incidentally, had everything to do with scheduling. We could have gone to a worse hospital and gotten service faster, but it wasn't life-threatening, so we waited for the best.

TzuDoNim, please acknowledge your stupidity and wrongness.

So what part of the country do you guys live that you get insta-appointments? Many times I have to wait more than days, even weeks to get an appointment. And I don't know about you, but visits to the hospital's emergency room are often a nightmare because you have a long wait unless you're bleeding to death in front of the counter.

I also would like to meet these bartering doctors that have nothing better to do but accept trinkets from Tzu so they can get paid.

The funny thing is that a lot of good doctors in the area won't even see you if you don't have insurance, they don't care if you mean to pay cash, if it's not the insurance they take or you don't have anything you can move along.

Nothing to acknowledge there. Your disagreement and head in the sand attitude doesn't negate my argument.

Primary care physician appointments or specialist appointments? I can usually get a next-day appointment with my PCP, and specialists are usually scheduled a week out.

Scheduling a check-up with my primary care physician can definitely take weeks, but the couple of times I've had more pressing issues I was able to get in the day I called.

The craziest luck I had was this summer, when my regular doctor referred me to a neurologist, who I had never seen before, and somehow managed to get in to see him 15 minutes after my doctor's visit.

Oh, I don’t doubt that it could produce a significant drop in cost if implemented properly, it’s just... it’s about as likely as Obama instituting an NHS style system.

Fifteen billion dollars in lost productivity? Nearly five billion in lost government revenue? Creeping decay. Multiply that by 10 in the U.S economy, collapse.

Five billion and counting on how to reduce wait times? Wouldn't it make more sense to just use that five billion to hire more doctors? I mean, not having enough doctors is one thing that seems to be a problem with your system, yes?

Tzu, always source your quotes. It's essential when debating, and common courtesy besides.

If you lack insurance, you can negotiate a better rate with doctors that accept cash and non-insurance patients, not to mention they'll more often then not help you out by giving you the 'samples' that pharma reps leave to avoid costly prescriptions. So instead of prescribing you say... 60 pills, they give you 45 in free samples and write you a prescription for 15. Not every doctor is like this but there are some real gems out there that friends and family have gone to see when they didn't have insurance for whatever reason.

As for waiting time? I live on the East Coast. My daughters doctor is in upstate New York (same pediatrician that treated me when I was a baby, apparently) and my doctor is in Connecticut where we live.

Almost all Emergency Room visits me or my family had, were instantaneous but then I only go there in cases of an emergency.

As for PCP.. I can get an appointment same day if I call first thing in the morning for either me or my daughter and my PCP is the Medical Director of the facility, so you can imagine his time is tight (only one time was he unavailable and I had to see someone else at the practice). If something comes up later on in the day, I can still get a visit but they'll have to squeeze me in between other patients so I usually have to wait longer in the waiting area (5 minutes usually but those visits are 20 minutes on average.. the iphone has made that easier) Twice I've called the answering service to have the doctor see me or my daughter while the office is closed, usually its a return phone call at home and results in a prescription being sent to a 24 hour pharmacy but if it turns out the symptoms are more severe he will recommend an emergency room vist and he'll meet us down there (this hasn't happened but comforting to know you'll be in good hands at the ER). They charge extra for that and insurance doesn't cover it but it deters abuse of the service and the doctor can waive the fee... which he has done both times for us.

The key here is to have a PCP at a place that has multiple doctors so incase your doctor isn't available you can still be seen by someone else in the practice and you want to make sure that you have a doctor that has gone to a very good school, has admitting rights to hospitals in your area and has ties to the area for a long time. It prevents them moving around from place to place and dropping an insurance plan that you are on. This actually happened to us, the pediatrician dropped our insurance plan (the insurance company was screwing them out of payments and undercutting their costs) but we continued to go there out of pocket and enough parents did the same thing so they renewed that insurance plan.

Edmonton Sun.

I wonder why this guy doesn't quote the decade's worth of studies showing three things:

We pay less.

We are just as satisfied, and healthier, than insured Americans, i.e., we are as well off or better off.

We are far more satisfied and healthier than uninsured Americans.


Of course, broad statistical analysis has nothing on some guy making a speech. Now if you want some real criticism, we can talk about the upcoming cuts put in place by Conservatives who just ditched whatever revenue was gained from premiums and gave themself a nice, big, fat raise before deciding on offering early retirement to the most experience RNs to save cash. It ain't all handshakes and buns up here.

This is, of course, due to incompetent administration on the part of Conservatives and not indicative of an ideological failure. This stuff about sliding into decay, though . . . can anyone list a Canadian city as wretched as Detroit? Or a failure of our government on the scale of the debacle in New Orleans?

No, you are right, my bad. I was closing up shop for the day and utlilizing Lexis-Nexis and didn't have direct access to links.

"How Canada Measures Up" was a Globe and Mail article from June 19, 2009 Friday, pg. A8

The lost productivity article was from The Toronto Star January 16, 2008 Wednesday, pg A19

The Lorne Bellan quote was from The Toronto Sun June 19, 2009 Friday, pg 28.

My apologies again as I was rushing out the door at the end of the day.

You spend 15-17% of your GDP on healthcare, check out those numbers in countries that offer 100% free universal healthcare.

Which is the funniest bit about this argument, if Canada is creeping towards decay, we’re Usain Bolting.

The Sun must've reprinted it. Probably with a huge headline like "Canada Sliding Into Decay!!" and they would use double exclamation points too.

Behold our slide into decay.

I sent this to my one of my best friends who's Canadian and has lived there his entire life (he's 29 or so now):

Hippocrates don't like beaners. Look it up.

you lie!

Again: my mother JUST HAD ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY IN ONTARIO. At the best clinic in the province. The wait time was 5 days, and that was only because a couple of urgent trauma cases came in and then the weekend hit.

Anecdotal or not, I just directly experienced the system that Tzu is blithely claiming has hellish wait times, and I have no fucking idea how anyone arrived at an average wait time of 26 weeks. No idea. I'm sorry that your stats are lying, Tzu, but they are.

Here's a possibility: if the entire province of Ontario is being factored in, there are a lot of remote Northern towns where orthopedic surgery might require airlifting or other elaborate transportation procedures. That's all I can think of. But SOMETHING is juking those stats like crazy.

And yeah, Opthamology? What the fuck? That's privatized, and I've never had long wait times for it anyway.

Also, I'm seeing a specialist right now--it's for a very minor condition, but still, I've had no particularly unreasonable wait times. I've always been able to book appointments within days.

Something is deeply rotten with the statistics Tzu's spouting here. I don't care if the souce is Canadian--we have all the same journalism problems you guys do. I'll investigate further when I'm less busy with the TIFF.

Doctor's don't work for free. Sure, YOU didn't pay for it. I'm pretty sure leprechaun's aren't paying for it. So, where is the money coming from?

Could I request Kate go to the other side of the debate? TIA.

I’d be curious to see what you find as, even the economists I’ve heard who want Medicare for all in this country appear to believe the wait times in Canada are a significant issue, not enough to throw the entire system under the bus (as Tzu seems to be doing), but enough to point to it as a serious problem with the system.

Hey, dipshit.

Stop being a dipshit.

Until you actually get a REAL job and START paying taxes, I'm sure you DON'T care.

Even a blind nut finds a squirrel eventually. Power and control.

People with common sense and an IQ higher than a wristwatch.

I'm assuming you make less than $10,000 a year based on your statement. If that is true, then frankly, you aren't making shit, and you definitely aren't paying much in the way of taxes.

Sure, sounds like a lot of money, but when people who own small businesses have to give away half their income, what do you think will happen?

They will start lowering salaries, cutting jobs, or closing their businesses.

Consider that small firms represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms, employ over half of all private sector employees, pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll, and have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years. [URL="http://www.sba.gov/advo/stats/sbfaq.pdf"]

Over taxation will be disastrous for this country.