Morn'in All,
“You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into… the Twilight Zone.”Thank you, Rod Serling
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-vote-obamacare-repeal-measure-late-night-session-n705816Okay.
Your various investments are represented in the rail cars in this
image. Your investment train is approaching the switch yard. Are you, will you remain on the investment through line and bypass the switch yard? Well, you get the picture.
Wishing all a positive 2017 investing year. I'm thinking magic 8 ball and Ouija board for this house; as I've thrown away the dart board (too many old holes).
Regards,
Catch
Comments
Yes...there's that. I wonder if this author has an understanding as to what insurance companies considered "pre-existing conditions" prior to the ACA?
@Crash I should have written more properly; but the drift ultimately is the challenge going forward with our investments, including healthcare related at this house.
@Maurice I'm done fighting the political wars. Too many past battles (not here) with a mix of wins and losses. As noted: I should have been more clear about this current battle in D.C. and what to look forward to, as related to our investing.
Perhaps choose VWINX or similar and go play. I have more than enough other constructive areas than need attention in my life, too.
Regards,
Catch
until they get iffy and feel omg after finding out some the facts about it and its accomplishments
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/health_care_law
Some real comedy ahead, especially from legislators:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-obamacare-idUSKBN14W0MC
For average DTR voters, just panic.
The NYPost guy must be majorly stoned to be so unsophisticated at this late date about the essential fact of the need for the three legs of the stool. Jeez. Can't wait to see what he writes tomorrow.
A la carte and no mandate, huh. Yeah, that'll work.
http://nypost.com/2017/01/13/heres-what-happens-after-obamacare-is-gone/
This dude is from the Cato Institute, and all you need to know is that he thinks ACA is in a death spiral when in fact it is healthy and growing, until it's not, which may be less soon or much later. As reality dawns.
Thanks for posting this reasonable-sounding claptrap installment I.
We can only hope it goes at least as well as he predicts (there will be winners and losers, he informs us). Like high-risk drivers, bwahaha.
Maybe in England, whence he hails, no one is ever suddenly seriously ill. No, wait, they have a different system. The horror.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/there-will-be-no-obamacare-replacement
http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/01/13/gop-governors-and-reality-clash-with-congress-on-the-aca/
https://www.cato.org/events/debate-libertarianism-vs-conservatism-2
Another organization on that list, Heritage, was credited by Obama as being the source of the ACA concept. Politifact rated this statement "mostly true".
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/apr/01/barack-obama/obama-says-heritage-foundation-source-health-excha/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2011/10/20/how-a-conservative-think-tank-invented-the-individual-mandate/#6da469af621b
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-vows-insurance-for-everybody-in-obamacare-replacement-plan/2017/01/15/5f2b1e18-db5d-11e6-ad42-f3375f271c9c_story.html
Giving someone credit is not an exclusive act; one person giving credit does not prevent others from doing the same. Obama crediting Heritage does not mean that only he was "brilliant" enough to recognize Heritage's ideas. In fact, as I've written before, Obama was slow on the uptake, campaigning against the mandate.
What I'm trying to point out is that Obama among others felt that Heritage, and presumably others on Hank's list of 50, could have ideas "worth reading".
Even if one disagrees with every word that each of these organizations writes, the alternative to reading any of them is to turn up the volume in one's echo chamber.
What I was trying to say (not very effectively) is that a lot of impressive sounding names (i.e. Institute for ...) serve as "covers" for some highly slanted points of view, often funded by big money with an underlying agenda. The news media doesn't do a very good job pointing out this bias to the viewing/reading public when citing these organizations in their news stories.
Some in particular, like The American Enterprise Institute and Cato, I have a lot of trouble with when I hear their right-leaning strongly biased presentations (often on C-Span - when it's not being interrupted by Russian programming.)
Nonsense can be found all over the spectrum. That's not to say I don't think a lot more nonsense is coming from some quarters than from others. I'm pretty confident that most people feel the same way. People just disagree on which quarters those are
As cable news goes, I watch little, but probably tune in Fox more now than MSNBC or CNN. Being fed a constant stream of "news" that agrees with me isn't healthy or very enlightening.
As @msf (I think) acknowledges, the issue is one of transparency. Readers and viewers ought to know where their news source is "coming from". I'm maybe a bit jaded on this because 2 of the 3 major network TV outlets in our area are owned by Sinclair Broadcasting (ABC & NBC). Their daily "local" newscast is loaded with national stories full of right wing propaganda with no acknowledgement of the bias inherent in the organizations they cite for their often inflammatory stories. These stations are where a majority of the locals (many without cable) tune to for their daily dose of news, weather, sports, - and they're fed this daily diet of ---- (pick your own four letter word).
Also, one can be credited for any activity, novel or not. "Even though he failed, I credit him with giving a 100% effort."
To use a familiar example of how people can misinterpret what act being credited, here's a statement from some of the actual inventors of the internet (Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf): Credit, not for "inventing" the internet, not for being the first (discovery) or only to recognize its value, but for playing a significant role in promoting the internet and facilitating its evolution to what it is today.
>> Another organization on that list, Heritage, was credited by Obama as being the source of the ACA concept.
which to my ear contains notions of 'cited' along with (and more important) 'this partly accounts for my creation'. A nod toward causality. The fact of Heritage coming up with it (esp the individual mandate, with all conservative talk about personal responsibility) has nothing to do with BO, really, so perhaps a verb 'recognized' or 'noted' would have suited better.
My read, anyway, and not important, and sort of the opposite of the poor Gore goring.
Meanwhile, here is today's take:
http://www.vox.com/2017/1/16/14281206/trump-obamacare-plan
Yes, but I also think the issue goes deeper. Just because a media outlet is reporting a lot of tripe (I prefer my words to be five letters), that doesn't mean that everything it is reporting must automatically be false.
For decades and decades, local news has followed the edict: if it bleeds, it leads. The crimes being reported were and are real. This programming was often done with no intent to mislead people about the crime rate. It was done to attract viewers. If you want to say that one could infer this by looking at the owners of the local stations (for-profit companies), and that one should instead be watching nonprofit outlets like PBS, BBC, etc., fair enough.
Sometimes, it's simply a matter of getting multiple perspectives (rashomon effect). Often, it is looking at how words are used intentionally or unintentionally to mislead, and how relevant facts are presented or omitted.
That's where knowing who is doing the reporting helps. If there's any basis in reality for a story, work at getting a complete picture. For example, the long term trend in violent crime is significantly downward. But that doesn't mean there isn't some factual basis for reports of rising crime, given that places like Chicago are experiencing spikes in murder rates. (They're just not rising in Atlanta.)
Better to try to get a complete picture to understand what's going on, and like weather vs. climate, how to interpret data.
' GOP health plans are one long attempt to evade reality that covering everyone has to cost healthy and/or wealthy *something* '
Thanks! I had to look up that five-letter word in The Free Dictionary. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/tripe
Actually, it appears to have a pretty complex and interesting etymology.
-
tripe (trīp)
n.
1. The rubbery lining of the stomach of cattle or other ruminants, used as food.
2. Informal Something of no value; rubbish.
[Middle English, from Old French tripes, intestines, tripe.]
-
Re: If it bleeds it leads. True - but that's a bit old-school (at least in our part of the country). Oh - we still have the occassional house fire, B&E and violent assault. But, probably as a result of limited budgets for sending out live reporters, local news is now devoting a significant portion of its daily 22 minute newscast (excluding commercials) to "canned" national stories ("special reports" as they like to label them) - and tinged with subtle but discernible bias. These are produced by the corporate owners and distributed to their company owned stations for airing locally. Conservative think-tanks like Cato are often credited as the "source" of the information.
I long for the "good old days" of the '80s and '90s when the local newscast was all about fires, floods, murders and accidents. That was much less insidious, I think, than these tripe-filled "specials" focused on national political issues. Sinclair Broadcasting has been on a buying spree for several years. Their local market stations are known for presenting this type of tripe. There's quite a lot about them on the internet for those who'd like to learn more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/opinion/the-gops-health-care-death-spiral.html
As an example of how it is opinion, this column states that Congress reneged on its promise to help insurers in the first years of the program by limiting risk. That's a reference to a rider to the 2015 appropriations bill requiring risk corridors to be revenue neutral.
In plain English, risk corridors equalize risk among insurers by taking money from those insurers with predominantly healthy members and giving money to those with a greater percentage of sick policy holders. The rider forbids the federal government from adding money to the pot, in case the collections from the insurers with healthy customers didn't cover the payments to the insurers with lots of claims filed.
But CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid) had already issued regulations (April 11, 2014) saying that the program would be revenue neutral (even though that wasn't required by the ACA statute). While the rider was more severe (requiring revenue neutrality on a calendar year basis rather than over the three years risk corridors would exist), it is not accurate to fault Congress for reneging on its promise to help. The executive branch (CMS) had already done that. Congress just upped the ante.
The column goes on to say that the 2015 legislation is the reason why premiums are jumping in 2017. Really! That legislation took two years to make an impact? The reason for this 2017 one-time spike in rates is that a number of provisions, including the risk corridors, were designed to sunset after 2016 in the original legislation.
None of this detracts from the fact that 18-32 million people will lose health insurance if there is repeal of only the budgetary/tax portions of ACA while leaving the rest (e.g. guarantee issue, health exchanges) in place. But get this info from news reports, not opinion pieces.
Here's the NYTimes one page summary article of the just released CBO study documenting this. The CBO study is very short (4 pages), plain English, very readable with bullet points. While the NYTimes summary appears accurate, I suggest going to the source.
That way, you'll know what assumptions CBO made, what it is thinking will be repealed, how it expects people to respond (buy more expensive insurance or go without), etc.
Soon to expand to the full 18 acres.
"I think what the team told me is that there is such a tremendous amount of interest in this incoming administration that they are giving some consideration to finding a larger venue on the 18 acres in the White House complex to accommodate the extraordinary interest,' said Pence today on Face the Nation. " http://en.mogaznews.com/World-News/335729.html
" Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam ..."