Well Said [30 Nov 2013]

These are good lines I have either read or heard somewhere. My original idea was for this to be a weekly thing, but I've been busy lately, and some of these have been in my drafts for a while :)

This is from a post by The Wise Fool. I've been thinking about this type of thing a lot lately. Many atheists seem very interested in winning debates, or making theists look foolish. But I would like to change people's minds, and to do that we need to understand one another better.

This one is from Steve Shives at about 8:00 in a riffing on mail call video in response to someone bitching about insurance premiums going up because of Obamacare

This is what I don't understand about the people who want to repeal obamacare so bad. It's like they forget the old system was broken as fuck, and prices were rising like crazy. Obamacare is far from perfect, I wish the people who are against it would identify the shitty things about it and fix them rather than focus on repealing it. Or failing that, draft an alternate plan to put in it's place before repealing it.

This last one is from the Bitchspot Report #37 at about an hour in. Cephus was discussing the ridiculous talking point that people around the world hate us for our freedom.

Politics [Immigration, Flags]

Last week I talked about wanting to post about politics once a week. Two weeks in a row, we're off to a good start!

photo credit

S. 744: The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill

We'll start with the big immigration bill in the senate right now. The bill itself is 1304 pages, so it looks like I will have to rely on other people's summaries as to what is in it. Actually, now that I think about it, the Senators must have to do the same thing, I can't imagine they are reading these bills either. This seems like a terrible way to do business. There's actually quite a lot written in the opposing and endorsing lists as well. I guess I'll alternate and do as many of them as I can stand.

Endorsing: National Education Association (NEA)

a pathway to citizenship for more than 11 million aspiring Americans, ensuring and promoting family unity, and inclusion of the DREAM Act.

I certainly like the idea of a pathway to citizenship, I really do think that children who were brought over here illegally should have a way to become legal citizens. It can't be too easy though, mass amnesty is garbage. They should have to work for it, but there should be a way.

The “Little Dreamer” amendment to be offered by Senator Blumenthal ensures that children under the age of 13 are eligible for a 5 year expedited pathway to citizenship, and are not relegated to the 13 year pathway to citizenship simply because of their age. A 5 year pathway to citizenship for Little Dreamers would put them on par with their older brothers and sisters, who may be eligible for the 5 year expedited pathway under the Dream Act, and ensures equity within families.

5 year path to citizenship for children and 13 year path for adults. That certainly sounds pretty reasonable on the surface.

Opposing: NumbersUSA

Like the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, S. 744 is mass amnesty now, with only promises of weak enforcement later.

Well, that's very frustrating, because one of these two groups is lying. If it's mass amnesty now I'm against it, if it's 5 year for children and 13 year for adults I'm probably for it. Which is true?

Endorsing: National Council of La Raza (NCLR)

Nothing of value said here

Opposing: Heritage Action

The Gang of Eight’s immigration bill, drafted behind closed doors, is an amnesty first plan. 

within six months, the Gang of Eight’s bill will grant amnesty almost everyone who entered the country illegally prior to 2012.

Again, if this is true the bill sucks.

Endorsing: Scanning the rest

There's a lot of "this bill is not perfect but it's a good step". No real information as far as I could tell

Opposing: Scanning the rest

Lots of talk about quick amnesty and waste of taxpayer money.

---

I'm sure this is completely obvious, but I don't know what the hell I'm doing here. Does anyone know where I can get real information about this stuff? Ideally I would go read the bill now, but it's so damn long that's just not going to happen. One side or the other is flat out lying, and quite frankly, it is exactly over the part of this that is the most important. If it is blanket amnesty for anyone who has come in before 2012 then it is complete garbage and should be voted down. If it is a long hard process for people who contribute and are willing to work for their citizenship then it is most likely something I would support. So how do I find out which it is?

[The next day]

So I wrote everything above here yesterday, and last night on the daily show they were talking about it a bunch. Apparently this bill has been all over the place and I just wasn't paying attention to the right places. One thing that really jumped out at me (because I had been looking for this earlier that day) was that they mentioned that the path to citizenship takes 13 years.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

So I decided I would look a little bit harder today and see if I can find some better information. A quick search led me here, which describes the law a bit, you have to fulfill certain requirements and it looks like it takes quite a while. And I found an article here, which pretty much agrees that amnesty is a bad idea, but this bill isn't amnesty. I think I've done enough here, the people who are claiming this is just amnesty are just liars spreading misinformation. Fuck those guys!

---

photo credit

H.R. 2355: To require the purchase of domestically made flags of the United States of America for use by the Federal Government.

This one just kinda cracked me up. There's no information except the title, perhaps that's all we need here. On one hand it seems like unnecessary bloat legislation, on the other hand, we certainly should be making our flags here right? Our military flying an american flag that is made in China just seems stupid. Perhaps this is the kind of stimulus we should be focusing on. Don't give out free money, but instead pay an extra few cents per flag and buy it locally.

Perhaps this is one of those things where the guy proposing it knows its garbage but just wants to be able to go home and say "look at this patriotic bill I tried to pass!"

A Touch of Politics

photo credit: wikipedia

I talked last year (damn, it's been a year?) about wanting to delve into politics a little bit. I found the website popvox when the whole sopa/pipa thing was happening. You can look at bills, say you oppose/approve and send write a personalized reason why. It will automatically send a letter to your member of congress on your behalf, and when it's election time you can look back at their voting record and see how much they lined up with you. Pretty cool.

I had originally planned on looking at what was going to happen in congress each week and weigh in on whatever was coming, however, I had trouble finding a reliable list of what was coming up, and I got busy and distracted and so forth. But I think it is important to let our congressmen know that we are watching, so I want to try to get back to it in some capacity.

It also turns out they email you if there is an amendment (or an important amendment perhaps?) to a bill, that's what brought my attention back to this stuff. I got an email about a bill that I weighed in on a while ago, it's a bill that is trying to outlaw abortion after 20 weeks. I highly recommend that you go over there and say you oppose it. If possible write a personalized message, I imagine the representatives will be more likely to consider something that comes with an explanation.

I guess I'll just scan through the bills on the front page and see what catches my eye

H.R. 1892: Unlocking Technology Act of 2013
This one seems pretty cut and dry. It should be legal to unlock our damn phones

H.R. 2247: The Collectible Firearms Protection Act
This is interesting. A bill to exempt collectible guns from import without having to deal with normal gun laws. I guess it ultimately depends on what counts as a "collectible", but on the surface this seems fine. Your generally not going to be committing a crime with some antique collectible gun. Unless I'm missing something this seems okay. There's no organizations opposing or supporting. I wonder what that means.

S. 744: The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill
This one is much more difficult. It's long, and there seems to be a lot to it. I haven't had a chance to properly look into it yet, but I figured I'd bring it up anyway. Perhaps I'll have a chance to look into this one more in depth and bring it up again next week.
Immigration is a difficult topic, I like the idea of a path to citizenship, especially for people who were brought into the country illegally as children. But I don't like the idea of mass amnesty, it's just bad policy. I definitely need to look into this one a bit more.

---

Well, that's all for today. I'm not sure exactly what I want this to be, I like the idea of doing something along these lines each week, we'll just have to see if this develops into something and what form it winds up taking.

---

[edit] when I abandoned intense debate, all of the comments went away. I'm can see them but getting them back on the blog is proving to be a challenge. This is one idea, I'm not sure if it's worth it, but I will try. Unfortunately, they are also backward, read bottom to top

Bitter Pill: Every American Needs to Read this Article

Go Read the Cover Article

I was reading the Time cover article "Bitter Pill" by Steven Brill this morning. It's all about how screwed up our medical system is and how the billing works. It's super long, it will piss you off, and you need to read it. Seriously, go read it!

Jon Stewart also interviewed Steven Brill and had an extended interview, it is worth watching as well.
Part 1

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Part 2

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Part 3

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

I'm not really sure what else to write about here, as I was reading the article I highlighted some quotes that I figured I'd share here, but mostly I just want everyone to read this article. If you have a blog of your own, I highly encourage you to read the article and do a post on it as well, even if it is pretty simple and just let's all of your readers know it exists. I really would like everyone in america to see this thing. Regardless of your political position, I imagine you are hard pressed to not find the problems in this article compelling. We might disagree on the solution, but we should at least be able to agree that there is a huge fucking problem. If you don't have a blog, share it on twitter, facebook, and all of those other social media ker'jiggers that you young folk do nowadays.

From page 1:

When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?

And what is so different about the medical ecosystem that causes technology advances to drive bills up instead of down?

In the U.S., people spend almost 20% of the gross domestic product on health care, compared with about half that in most developed countries. Yet in every measurable way, the results our health care system produces are no better and often worse than the outcomes in those countries.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the pharmaceutical and health-care-product industries, combined with organizations representing doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, health services and HMOs, have spent $5.36 billion since 1998 on lobbying in Washington. That dwarfs the $1.53 billion spent by the defense and aerospace industries and the $1.3 billion spent by oil and gas interests over the same period. That’s right: the health-care-industrial complex spends more than three times what the military-industrial complex spends in Washington.

From page 2:

According to the hospital’s latest filing (covering 2010), its total expenses for laboratory work (like Janice S.’s blood tests) in the 12 months covered by the report were $27.5 million. Its total charges were $293.2 million. That means it charged about 11 times its costs.

In relation to the chargemaster (a list of the prices of things in the hospital)

“It’s a list we use internally in certain cases, but most people never pay those prices. I doubt that Brian [Grissler] [a hospital CEO] has even seen the list in years. So I’m not sure why you care.”
Orstad also refused to comment on any of the specifics in Janice S.’s bill, including the seemingly inflated charges for all the lab work. “I’ve told you I don’t think a bill like this is relevant,” he explained. “Very few people actually pay those rates.”
But Janice S. was asked to pay them.

An “NM MYO REST/SPEC EJCT MOT MUL” was billed at $7,997.54. That’s a stress test using a radioactive dye that is tracked by an X-ray computed tomography, or CT, scan. Medicare would have paid Stamford $554 for that test.

From page 3:

there is little patient pushback against higher costs because it seems to (and often does) result in safer, better care and because the customer getting the treatment is either not going to pay for it or not going to know the price until after the fact.

In health care, being nonprofit produces more profit.

60% of the personal bankruptcy filings each year are related to medical bills.

From page 5:

 A note at the end of an Ernst & Young audit that is attached to Mercy’s IRS filing reported that the chain provided charity care worth 3.2% of its revenue in the previous year. However, the auditors state that the value of that care is based on the charges on all the bills, not the actual cost to Mercy of providing those services — in other words, the chargemaster value.

Pharmaceutical and medical-device companies routinely insert clauses in their sales contracts prohibiting hospitals from sharing information about what they pay and the discounts they receive. 

MD Anderson’s charge of $7 each for “ALCOHOL PREP PAD.” This is a little square of cotton used to apply alcohol to an injection. A box of 200 can be bought online for $1.91.

From page 6:

“[Steven (a patient with lung cancer)] kept saying he wanted every last minute he could get, no matter what. But I [Steven's wife Alice] had to be thinking about the cost and how all this debt would leave me and my daughter.” By the time Steven D. died at his home in Northern California the following November, he had lived for an additional 11 months. And Alice had collected bills totaling $902,452. The family’s first bill — for $348,000 — which arrived when Steven got home from the Seton Medical Center in Daly City, Calif., was full of all the usual chargemaster profit grabs: $18 each for 88 diabetes-test strips that Amazon sells in boxes of 50 for $27.85; $24 each for 19 niacin pills that are sold in drugstores for about a nickel apiece. There were also four boxes of sterile gauze pads for $77 each. None of that was considered part of what was provided in return for Seton’s facility charge for the intensive-care unit for two days at $13,225 a day, 12 days in the critical unit at $7,315 a day and one day in a standard room (all of which totaled $120,116 over 15 days). There was also $20,886 for CT scans and $24,251 for lab work.

From page 7:

In fact, Palmer — echoing a constant and convincing refrain I heard from billing advocates across the country — alleged that the hospital triple-billed for some items used in Scott’s care in the intensive-care unit. “First they charge more than $2,000 a day for the ICU, because it’s an ICU and it has all this special equipment and personnel,” she says. “Then they charge $1,000 for some kit used in the ICU to give someone a transfusion or oxygen … And then they charge $50 or $100 for each tool or bandage or whatever that there is in the kit. That’s triple billing.”

“People, especially relatively wealthy people, always think they have good insurance until they see they don’t,” says Palmer. “Most of my clients are middle- or upper-middle-class people with insurance.”

From page 8:

The pharmaceutical industry’s common explanation for the price difference is that U.S. profits subsidize the research and development of trailblazing drugs that are developed in the U.S. and then marketed around the world. Apart from the question of whether a country with a health-care-spending crisis should subsidize the rest of the developed world — not to mention the question of who signed Americans up for that mission — there’s the fact that the companies’ math doesn’t add up.
According to securities filings of major drug companies, their R&D expenses are generally 15% to 20% of gross revenue. In fact, Grifols spent only 5% on R&D for the first nine months of 2012.

All the numbers tell one consistent story: Regulating drug prices the way other countries do would save tens of billions of dollars while still offering profit margins that would keep encouraging the pharmaceutical companies’ quest for the next great drug.

From page 10:

A $121,414 Stanford Hospital bill for a 90-year-old California woman who fell and broke her wrist became $16,949. A $51,445 bill for the three days an ailing 91-year-old spent getting tests and being sedated in the hospital before dying of old age became $19,242. Before Medicare went to work, the bill was chock-full of creative chargemaster charges

From page 11:

The real issue isn’t whether we have a single payer or multiple payers. It’s whether whoever pays has a fair chance in a fair market. 

We should outlaw the chargemaster.

we should embarrass Democrats into stopping their fight against medical-malpractice reform and instead provide safe-harbor defenses for doctors so they don’t have to order a CT scan whenever, as one hospital administrator put it, someone in the emergency room says the word head.

They know what the core problem is — lopsided pricing and outsize profits in a market that doesn’t work. Yet there is little in Obamacare that addresses that core issue or jeopardizes the paydays of those thriving in that marketplace. In fact, by bringing so many new customers into that market by mandating that they get health insurance and then providing taxpayer support to pay their insurance premiums, Obamacare enriches them. That, of course, is why the bill was able to get through Congress.

Put simply, with Obamacare we’ve changed the rules related to who pays for what, but we haven’t done much to change the prices we pay.

Have you gotten to the bottom of my post and haven't read the source article yet? Dude, go read it, seriously!

popvox

I have recently been thinking about one of the reasons I started this blog, namely making a difference in my own small way. I love the idea of having conversations with people and perhaps even changing someone's mind every once in a while. This doesn't have to be a huge change (although if it is that is awesome), simply having a good conversation and making someone see a small point in a new way is what I am going for. This of course goes both way, I feel I have benefited quite a bit from the various conversations I've had since starting.

So anyway, I have been thinking of this idea in relation to politics lately. The most frustrating thing about politics to me is that I feel helpless to really do anything. I vote, but it doesn't really feel like it matters. I recently watched a video from a guy in local politics who said one thing that affects him is when voters send in their opinions, especially if there is a personalized message with it. It reminded me of a website I had played with very briefly during the whole sopa/pipa fiasco at the end of last year.

The site was popvox. It is pretty cool, you can look up any bill in the senate or the house, and if you have an opinion you can click oppose or support, you can also write a personalized message if you wish. Then if you put in your address, it will automatically figure out who your congressmen are and send your message to them. I have gotten messages back from them, so I know they are seeing it (well, realistically someone on their staff has seen it, but it's something).

I am still just checking the site out, but I have found a few neat things. First, there is a screen where you can look at all of the things you have weighed in on and how often your congressmen have voted along with your wishes. So when it comes time to vote, you should be able to go to this screen and see how closely the person in office matches you. If they overlap a lot, vote for them with confidence, if not, vote for the other guy. Also, when you move (which I'm in the middle of right now) it shows you how your new congressmen voted on all of that stuff too, an obvious feature, but it seems to be executed well.

Another thing that looks cool, there is a list of all of the bills that will be looked at in the upcoming week. So it looks like you can quickly scan through those at the beginning of the week and weigh in on the things you care about fairly quickly. I haven't had the chance to check this out in detail yet, but I have signed up for update emails and I'm optimistic about it.

I don't want to get too ahead of myself, but I would like to make posts about these bills semi-regularly. Perhaps just whenever I see something coming up that I think is really important, perhaps I can do a weekly post about it and talk about the week ahead. At any rate, I love the idea of following what is going on in congress a little bit better and letting them know we are watching. I figure this can only help things. I also love the idea of having a conversation with you guys about it.

Apologies to my international readers :)