- It was gay pride time last weekend. Lots of parades and marches. It’s great that it’s now okay to be everything under the sun. So why, oh why, oh why is it now NOT okay to be gay and Jewish? Man, some people have sure gotten selective about their “inclusivity.”
- New York pastor is surprised to discover that a gun-rights activist is human.
- “School vs the Gateless Gate: Fixing the Damage.” A great reprint from L. Reichard White and The Price of Liberty.
- Franklin Foer says the Dems need to appeal to white, working-class voters if they want to win elections. Well, yeah. But. How do you “appeal to the white working-class” when you’ve made it abundantly clear you and your loudest supporters consider Caucasians to be inherently baaaaad and consider the working class to be nothing but a “basket of deplorables”?
- The missing key to market-based health care reform.
- Seattle’s minimum-wage hike “may have gone too far.” (New study, which doesn’t focus — as most do — only on restaurant workers shows even Seattle’s booming economy can’t absorb the imposed wage without hurting those on the bottom.)
- Oh well. Have a cat surfing on the back of a swimming dog.
- And panoramic photo fails — with animals! (Love that two-legged golden Lab.)
During the 70s a friend and I visited Abaco, one of the less-touristy islands of the Bahamas, where we found that they, too, ran on “Indian time.” Among other things, we found that they ran their ferries at will – the will of the crew – often some 1 1/2 hours later than “scheduled.” When they showed up, that’s when the ferry ran. It was a wake-up call for me; except while actually at work, I have forever more done away with my watch.
…..
“The health-care industry’s strong preference for separating the financing of health care from its delivery has dictated developments ever since industry interests introduced the first forms of health insurance in the 1930s, ostensibly as a public service but also to ensure patients’ bills would be collectable with few questions asked.”
Sorry, but therein lies the problem. Health insurance ensures that those who do the work and deserve to be paid are NOT the same as those who collect the fees. When you’re paying one group to collect for another, you set up a potential conflict of interest, an unnecessary time lapse for payments, and overcharge for the work done.
I don’t think health can be considered in the same manner as other, “actuarial” types of insurance – *or maybe it should be done away with entirely.* Other insurance such as life, car, home, etc. is a one-shot deal – a death, car accident, home fire or flood – and then it’s paid for and finished; but health is an ongoing “problem” where insurance is concerned. There are accidents, to be sure, and one-time illness such as appendicitis, but mostly there are annual check-ups, chronic and terminal illness, preventive actions (by the patient) and tests (by the caregiver), drugs, medical devices, rehab, and nursing or home care – all of which need to be factored in over a lifetime, and over an insurance policy.
Health insurance is an expensive business because everybody has health – good or bad – and no two people can be expected to respond to lifestyles (genetically or environmentally) in the same manner or with the same effect. For this reason, it is anti-actuarial in nature; statistics and projections are of minimal use, yet these are what pass for criteria in the insurance business.
A _private_ contract is certainly necessary, but not necessarily with a third party. The medical caregiver should find his way back to the patient: respecting them as individuals, first and foremost, then recognizing that they alone have the power to dictate, through the pocketbook and their sovereignty, what gets done. If insurance can fit into that system, well and good; if not, no insurance is needed or welcome.
The total separation of medicine and state is the only logical solution to the “health care” thing, with any sort of contract or mutually agreed “insurance” as part of the deal. One of the more frustrating outcomes of the current mess is that far, far too many ordinary things in life – that used to be the sole responsibility of the individual and family – are now treated as a disease or as the responsibility of the insurance/medical people. Then there is the utter insanity of mandatory “insurance coverage” of the pre-existing condition. Far too many people seem to think this is only “fair,” yet would laugh at the suggestion an insurance company must write a new fire policy for a house that had already burned down.
Franklin Foer says the Dems need to appeal to white, working-class voters if they want to win elections.
A good portion of those who identify as Democrats have embraced identity politics as well as Critical Theory and its Orwellian spawn, Political Correctness (aka Cultural Marxism) and the highly racist Critical Race Theory. Unless Democrats reject these poisonous forms of politics and beliefs, white, working-class voters will reject the Democrats. Why join a party that hates us and blames us for all of society’s woes? Screw them!
Dems managed to rebrand themselves to the point were they get 97% of the african-american vote, while still being referred to as “the party of the Klan”.
Don’t know where you got 97%, ellendra. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html This source says 88% – but of course we don’t know from this if these folks voted for Hillary specifically, or the democrats generically. I’ve read that a good number of people who would otherwise have voted a generic D rejected Hillary specifically. For whatever that’s worth. 🙂
Other insurance such as life, car, home, etc. is a one-shot deal – a death, car accident, home fire or flood – and then it’s paid for and finished;
Well, no. We’ve had the same homeowner insurance since 1978, with the same company we’ve had auto insurance with since 1970. Different cars, different homes added and subtracted from the policy. We just went through a pipe break/replace some flooring and wallboard claim, but the policy and home are still there.
What we don’t have is a policy that will repaint the wood trim or replace the dishwasher, both of which were recently necessary.
In the recent ACA fiasco, the source of the President’s “You can keep your insurance if you like it” lie is the theory that medical insurance should pay for routine care, and that it should cover every kind of treatment like acupuncture that a special interest group can sell Congress on. This wiped out the affordable catastrophic plans, which cover unusually expensive treatments but leave me to reject or budget routine items.
The health-care industry’s strong preference
Is irrelevant. There’s so much government regulation of health care in general and the insurance industry in particular that almost all of your healthcare decisions are made by regulations. The Texas Insurance Code table of contents runs a dozen pages, times 50 states, plus federal regs.
Dems need to appeal…
Yet another article about how Democrats need to appeal to this or that group, without any suggestion that they first listen to the group.
I wonder if the gay Jews cheered or objected when Gay Pride events banned gay gun owners.
But then I completely don’t understand how anyone gay can support Palestinians. See what happens when you try to make them bake your same-sex wedding cakes.
More good news related to pot legalization:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/26/legalized-marijuana-is-making-it-harder-for-police-to-search-your-car/?utm_term=.0d3d4af8fedb#comments
A little more doubt of the right sort, and a little less faith of the wrong sort might do us all a bit of good…
In the article by the New York Pastor, she says she’s “really angry about ties to Russia and their influence on the election.” But she also put Andrei Rublev’s famous Icon of the Trinity on one of her blog posts, where she says some very interesting things:
“Whether I actually believe all the stuff about Jesus and Mary and Light from Light, true God from true God varies. Most of the time, I do, I think. Sometimes I don’t…”
“The places where we doubt, the places where we don’t know the answers but still show up to squint toward a tiny pinprick of light—these are what some theologians have called thin places. These are places where the boundary between heaven and earth is especially thin, places where we can sense the divine more readily, where mystery and possibility meet, and where God visits us in our doubt.”
She went to Baptist Theological Seminary? The above smells more like unreformed heresy to me. Quite a demo of her comment that “Nobody is the stereotype we believe they are.”