29-Oct-13 WV-New Zealand/U.S. resume military cooperation

Discussion of Web Log and Analysis topics from the Generational Dynamics web site.
John
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29-Oct-13 WV-New Zealand/U.S. resume military cooperation

Post by John »

29-Oct-13 World View -- New Zealand and U.S. resume military cooperation


Robert Reich: Obamacare is Nixon's health care plan

** 29-Oct-13 World View -- New Zealand and U.S. resume military cooperation
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... tm#e131029





Contents:
New Zealand and U.S. resume military cooperation
Israel to release 26 Palestinian prisoners
Robert Reich: Obamacare is Nixon's health care plan
Venezuela creates a Ministry for Supreme Social Happiness


Keys:
Generational Dynamics, New Zealand, Jonathan Coleman,
Chuck Hagel, ANZUS, Pearl Harbor,
Israel, Palestine,
Robert Reich, Obamacare, Richard Nixon,
Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, Hugo Chavez,
Vice-Ministry for the Supreme Social Happiness

Reality Check
Posts: 1441
Joined: Mon Oct 10, 2011 6:07 pm

Re: 29-Oct-13 WV-New Zealand/U.S. resume military cooperatio

Post by Reality Check »

John quoted Robert Reich as saying wrote:"In February 1974, Republican President Richard Nixon proposed, in essence, today's Affordable Care Act. Under Nixon's plan all but the smallest employers would provide insurance to their workers or pay a penalty, an expanded Medicaid-type program would insure the poor, and subsidies would be provided to low-income individuals and small employers. Sound familiar?"
John is accepting the characterization by Reich that the Nixon plan being the same as Obamacare.

In some ways it is. The alleged beneficiaries of both these plans, some portion of the uninsured, are to some degree the same.

But the differences between the two plans, and the differences between the claims regarding what Obamacare will deliver, and the design of Obamacare ( even if it could deliver what it is designed to deliver ) is far more interesting.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/03/health/ob ... gap-gupta/
1st, ( First ), Obamacare, as implemented, does not provide private health insurance to the working poor. Obamacare as implemented has a minimum, yes minimum ( that is not a typo ), annual wage requirement before one dime of subsidies will be provided. This means that in all fifty states, if a working familiy of four worked 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, and earned the highest state wide minimum wage in any of the 50 states ( which is also much higher than the federal minimum wage ) they would never, ever, be eligible for one penny of subsidy to buy private health insurance under Obamacare. Never. This is the best case scenario, in many states they could work 12 hours a day 7 days a week and never receive a dime in subsidies.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/03/health/ob ... gap-gupta/

2nd, ( Second ), only individuals making MORE THAN a lower middle class ANNAUAL WAGE and less that $120,000 for a family of four will receive MODEST insurance premium subsidies from FEDERAL taxpayers.

3rd, ( Third ), the bar for what qualifies as affordable health care ( as opposed to affordable insurance premiums ) has changed. Now a policy with a $5,000 dollar deductible, PER PERSON on the policy, a $500 per hospitalization co-pay, $75 dollar doctor co-pays for specialists ( and everyone except the primary care physician is a specialist ), 30% out of pocket co-insurance for all hospital bills over and above the $5,000 dollar deductible, are considered affordable health care. This is now defined as affordable health care by federal law.

4th, ( Fourth ), employer provided health care plans now meet the tax deductible requirements for employers provided plans if they downgrade their offerings to employees to meet the lower Obamacare standards. This is a substantial downgrading of the federal tax requirement on employers and has already resulted in the doubling and tripling of the per person deductibles on most employer health plans. THESE ARE PROBABLY THE LARGEST IMMEDIATE IMPACTS OF OBAMACARE BECAUSE THEY EFFECT THE MOST PEOPLE.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/03/health/ob ... gap-gupta/
5th, ( Fifth ), Obamacare, as implemented, requires the working poor to apply for state welfare and state medicaid, programs to obtain any assistance in obtaining help going to the doctor or seeking medical care. The state welfare limits on assets and income vary from state to state. As noted above, even those full time workers above the poverty line and firmly in the lower middle class are prohibited, by federal law, from obtaining one dime in subsidies to buy private insurance, because they make too little money. Working poor no longer have the option of buying limited medical coverage that does not cover maternity care, and mental health treatment, and illegal drug abuse treatment ( three very expensive medical benefits ) and private policies that once were affordable are no longer affordable.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/03/health/ob ... gap-gupta/

6th, ( Sixth ), Obamacare projected that30,000,000 ( 30 million ) people, out of a total of 50 million who did not have medical benefits of any kind, would gain medical coverage after Obamacare was passed. But of those 30 Million, 15,000,000 of those 30,000,000 million were projected to obtain medical benefits not by getting insurance, but instead by signing up for "expanded state welfare and medicaid" benefits.

7th, ( Seventh ), as implemented by law, the states will pickup the costs for the expanded Medicaid programs, not the Federal Government. With the Federal government providing help with 90% of the expansion cost for only 3 ( three ) of the 10 year federal costs for Obamacare implementation were projected. This makes the Obamacare implementation appear less expensive than if the Federal government were too pickup the entire cost for the full 10 years, but promises have been made that federal laws will be passed in the future so the federal government will not require the states to actually pay those expanded costs of Medicaid.

8th, ( Eighth ), private insurance companies, but not the Obamacare Exchange, must allow individuals to sign up for individual health care policies, anytime. By contrast, the Obamacare Exchanges will allow annual signups for the next calendar year only during a few months during the fall of each year ( except the first year when the sign up window is extended three months into March ). Any insurance company that offers individual policies in a state, and offers them outside the Obamacare exchange, must, by federal law enacted as part of Obamacare, allow a person who is diagnosed with cancer one day, to sign up for insurance the next, any month of the year. The Obamacare exchange does not have to do this, nor do employer sponsored insurance plans. As a result, as Obamacare is implemented many insurance companies are no longer offering any individual insurance policies in many states. Other insurance companies are canceling most of their policies and offering only policies that assume all applicants have pre-existing conditions that will have massive health care costs associated with them. The remaining, outside the exchange, individual policies, have massive insurance premiums for the healthy and sick applicants alike.


9th, ( Ninth ), state insurance laws vary by state. Some states require insurance companies to offer the same policies outside the exchanges as inside the exchanges. In those states few insurance companies offer individuals policies at all, neither through the exhanges nor outside the exchanges. The few individual policies that are offered in those states have very expensive premiums, since they are expecting mostly people with pre-existing conditions to sign up, along with people who sign up immediately after finding out they are sick.

10th, ( Tenth ), federal law under Obamacare has changed the definition of convenient access to health care under federal law, and pre-empted state law on these matters for all health plans with any nexus to the federal government. This includes all employer sponsored plans ( tax deductable ), all medicare advantage plans, all medicaid related plans, all plans issued through the Obamacare exchanges and eligible for subsidies. These federal law changes allow insurance companies to require patients to drive by near by hospitals to much more distant hospitals and allow insurance companies to exclude many hospitals from their Network. This is a cost saving measure that insurance companies in the Medicare advantage health insurance market are using to make up for hundreds of billions in Medicare funds cut to help pay for Obamacare. These changes that negatively impact elderly medicare recipients, as well as all others, have made the news recenly.

11th, ( Eleventh ), the threatened implementation of Obamacare employer penalties on January 1st, 2014, has resulted in all employers, and their benefit specialist contractors, to review all medical plans over the last three years and make changes that will be finalized in policies being offered in the fall of 2013, and that begin providing benefits on January 1, 2014. These changes, in total, have been, and will be, massive and will be noticed by the 70% to 80% of people who had their medical insurance through their employer prior to 2010. Seasonal employees, those that formerly worked 40 hours a week a few months a year, have now been limited to part time hours. All part time and seasonal employees have been reduced to 29 hours a week. Many employers have reduced full time positions and increased part time positions. Employer provided Health Insurance for part-time employees has been dropped. Since Obamacare exchange bronze policies are considered "quality health care policies" by federal law, and since these policies require the patient ( the employee ) to pay a huge portion of the health care costs, when compared to the typical employer plan before 2010, many employers are moving their policies toward this lower level of benefits and claiming they are proud to meet the "quality health care standards" of the "Affordable Care Act" and be in full compliance with the new federal laws on health care. In addition, every employee is giving up $65 dollars per year in health benefits paid by their employer and that amount is being paid instead to Obamacare to reduce the projected cost of Obamacare, when the ten year cost of Obamacare is calculated each year by the Congressional budget office. THESE ARE PROBABLY THE LARGEST IMMEDIATE IMPACTS OF OBAMACARE BECAUSE THEY EFFECT THE MOST PEOPLE.

12th, ( Twelth ), Obamacare, was intended and designed to shift medical costs off of employers and insurance companies and on to the higher income patients, it was intended. but only partially designed to be a transfer of wealth from the higher income to the lower income. As implemented it is shifting medical costs off of employers and insurance companies and on to patients of all incomes. Because the implementation is flawed, it may end up being solely a transfer of wealth from individual patients ( of all incomes ) to employers and insurance companies. It may also have the unintended consequence of decreasing visits to doctors and hospitals by the new class of sick under-insured ( sick patients with 5,000 dollar deductible plans who can not afford to obtain medical care unless they are dieing and willing to go bankrupt ). As implemented the plan will strand many of the working poor without insurance when they are kicked off Medicaid because they made too much money last month, but can not qualify for subsidies under the Exchanges because on an annual basis they still make too little money, and worse yet, the exchanges are only open three months a year to new enrollments.

Even the Obamacare exchanges paid and trained "navigators" have no idea how the exchanges are supposed to work for the purchase of insurance - just too complicated for anyone to figure out. Oregon, a Liberal bastion, has been working on their state run exchange for years, but zero insurance policies have been purchased through it. The navigators can not even answer simple questions about it, even when Navigators and spending hours searching for and answer, they can not answer simple questions:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1 ... 0628710134

Except - signing up the working poor for state welfare and state medicaid in those states who elected to massively expand their state welfare and state medicaid programs, and implement their own state run Obamacare exchanges. Navigators can help sign people up for state welfare and medicaid:



http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505267_162- ... structure/

NoOneImportant

Re: 29-Oct-13 WV-New Zealand/U.S. resume military cooperatio

Post by NoOneImportant »

Stifling my initial rage, I will not say lynch the sawed off little weasel. Instead I will bring to your attention Pelosi's now famous comment: "... we have to pass it so we can see what's in it..." It is now becoming apparent what is in it... guess after we rip off a bunch of fingernails, that we're gonna need a lot of rope, or maybe electric chairs might be a bit more efficient, in dealing with those who thought that they could foist this upon us./sarc off

I now understand why Cass Sunstein got out of Washington so quickly and hurriedly rushed back to Harvard... he was greatly responsible for the Obamacare content through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).

Anon

Re: 29-Oct-13 WV-New Zealand/U.S. resume military cooperatio

Post by Anon »

Were I not old enough to remember the start of Medicare, I'd probably think the ACA was a terrible disaster.

Medicare rolled out in the spring, IIRC. By fall, I don't think there was a hospital south of the Mason Dixon line that was accepting Medicare patients. Many people had trouble navigating the paperwork to join up, and medicare advisors were often giving the wrong advice. It took three years to get it right.

Sound familiar? And even the Tea Party is afraid to suggest touching Medicare now.

So I'm hardly ready to say a botched website = END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT. There's getting to be a bit of echo chamber here.

So, RC, are you demanding Medicare for all? That's what it seems you are suggesting.

NoOneImportant

Re: 29-Oct-13 WV-New Zealand/U.S. resume military cooperatio

Post by NoOneImportant »

When Medicare/Medicaid was passed there was a free, prosperous, and vibrant medical industry. There will be no free medical community in our future so long as we have a government that believes that there is no limit to what it may intrude upon; no limit to what it may force you to do. You have lost the right of free association with Obamacare. You may no longer freely approach any medical practitioner or third party and ask them to gamble on whether you will remain healthy or not for any given sum - and this is just the beginning, as, if it can be done to doctors, who may not be forced to also comply... and, after all, we must do it for the children.

If medical care is so important that it preempts free association, what may free association also not be repressed for? Is transportation so important as to be elevated to a government enforced mandate, and what about food, or housing, certainly they must be even more important than healthcare... but who will force the farmer to arise at 4am so that he can tend to his animals, and still be in the field before the sun breaks the horizon at dawn; and who will force him to work during planting, and harvest times for the extended 20 hour days that the inexorable passage of time requires of him each and every year, that he might obtain successful crop yields. Who? The Federal bureaucrat? People like you believe that there is no end to what you may force others to do.

Consider the sixteen year old high school kid who desires to become a doctor. He looks into his future and sees the remainder of high school, then he sees 4 years of undergraduate college, 4 years of medical school, - and say he desires to be a run-of-the-mill, if there is any such thing, abdominal surgeon he requires an additional 5 year residency. In short our sixteen year old, who desires to become a doctor, is looking at more time in additional schooling than he has been alive. For all of that time he may expect to accrue several hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, all the while earning a poverty level subsistence - if he is able to work at all. He obtains he first paying medical job while in his early 30s. All of this he endures that he may pursue, and obtain his stated goal - to be a doctor. Now, thanks to an invasive, intrusive government, what will he be offered and receive for that extraordinary effort? A position in a servile medical community where he will exercise virtually no latitude in providing patient care, or his future. He will possess little latitude about where and how he exercises his art, life, and/or medical practice. No my anonymous friend, our high schooler will not embrace that extraordinary effort to go on to practice medicine, so that government bureaucrats, and those like you may enslave him - so prepare for future shortages, and lots of them.

Medicine will be degraded to mediocrity, with medical advances slowly, inexorably, grinding to a halt, as hospitals will no longer be free to exercise the latitude to embrace "risky" medical research - research money will, eventually, be available from a single mediocre source, as there will certainly be no profit motive to drive research. Medicine like all controlled markets, will suffer with insufficient doctors, nurses, and paramedical technical practitioners. Personnel shortages will be routine, and legion. Extended procedure waiting periods will be the norm; and while there will be an appeal process for the bureaucratic mess, the bureaucratic delays will, essentially, make medicine a discipline without appeal. The routine organ transplant procedures of today will never be developed in a bureaucratic environment. Don't believe? Ask yourself what great gift to society has come from government? Permit me to help: the journey to the moon, perhaps? Sorry, all done by private free business enterprises. It is interesting to note that the Apollo 11 Moon landing's place in time is rapidly approaching being closer to Kitty Hawk, than to our moment in time.

Want cheaper medical care? Then subsidize the doubling, or tripling the medical school class sizes - flood the market with doctors, nurses, and paramedicals.

Government is a parasite it destroys, it doesn't create. What we are living through is the great leap backwards 250 years, to the time before the American Revolution, to the time of the Divine Right of Kings, where nothing was not subject to seizure - and as Obamacare illustrates, that includes your life.

John
Posts: 11479
Joined: Sat Sep 20, 2008 12:10 pm
Location: Cambridge, MA USA
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Re: 29-Oct-13 WV-New Zealand/U.S. resume military cooperatio

Post by John »

Just because Obamacare is a medical program doesn't mean it bears any
similarity to the launch of Medicare. Medicare did not attempt to
control the market. If you qualified, you could get a Medicare card
or not, as you preferred. If you were a doctor or a hospital, you
could accept Medicare cards or not, as you preferred. There was no
regulatory compulsion. So the Medicare launch is totally irrelevant,
and comparing Obamacare to Medicare is a red herring.

As I've now written many times, the comparable program is Nixon's
wage-price controls. Both of them destroy the marketplace, and then
try to use mandated controls to make up for it. You would have to be
REALLY STUPID to believe that could work. But what should one expect
from a Harvard Law School graduate who can't even do 7th grade
arithmetic?

Here's some news for today:

Bloomberg reports that insurance companies are opposed to
extending the enrollment period because that would cost them
a great deal of money.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-3 ... ofits.html

I've always had health insurance through employers, but when I was
young, I thought that if I had to buy health insurance, the best
choice would be something that covered catastophic illness, but not
much else, since I didn't need much else. That kind of policy is
illegal under Obamacare.

CNN reports that Obama administration officials are ordering insurance
company executives to keep their mouths shut about the Obamacare
disaster, or else the White House will target them and screw them.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/politics/ ... -pressure/

A professional body language expert is saying that President Obama is
showing signs that are like being close to a nervous breakdown.
http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/29/body- ... -glitches/

With regard to the last point, Obama has always lived in a fantasy
world ("This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow
and our planet began to heal), and apparently believed his own
fantasies, especially in foreign policy. He could keep his fantasies
because he was always well protected by the mainstream media. As I've
said before, if Obama picked up a gun and killed someone, then the NY
Times and NBC News would blame it on the Republicans.

Let's recall where Gen-Xers are coming from. They grew up in the
1980s when feminists were telling mothers to dump their husbands, lie
in court about domestic violence, and get as much money as possible.
Many Gen-Xers had no fathers in their lives, except for a string of
men in their mothers' beds, some of whom were abusive, and most of
whom were full of crap. When the mothers lied in court and got away
with it, the kids knew what their mothers were doing, and decided,
"I can do that!" And they did, resulting in the financial crisis.

All of this was apparently true of President Obama. His father was
still married when he married Obama's mother, but lied about it. The
mother went through a string of men. Like many Gen-Xers, Obama came
to hate men in his father's generation, and considered them totally
full of crap, people he could easily fool. But a lot of Gen-Xers in
the last decade have learned that the men in their fathers' generation
were not so full of crap after all, and it's been a shock to them.
This possibility is just now occurring to Obama. He arrogantly bet
all his chips on the Obamacare fantasy, and now he and his program are
facing disaster.

Guest

Re: 29-Oct-13 WV-New Zealand/U.S. resume military cooperatio

Post by Guest »

A professional body language expert is saying that President Obama is
showing signs that are like being close to a nervous breakdown.
At least we know he has good medical coverage for that.

NoOneImportant

Re: 29-Oct-13 WV-New Zealand/U.S. resume military cooperatio

Post by NoOneImportant »

Body language can be helpful when confronted with the generational lying influences referenced in John's message above.

Became a student of body language several decades ago... but would qualify myself as, at best, a novice.

Depending upon the person, their experience, and the topic under consideration, body language can convey for 75%-90% of the information communicated in a viewed - face-to-face, or video - discussion with a person. Body language is very difficult for most inexperienced people to control. The speaker does not realize that they are conveying what is being communicated via physical actions and voice inflection. It is for this reason that both labor, and company management employ "professional" negotiators during labor contract negotiations, as those professionals have spent years gaining control of self, so that personal mannerisms, and inflection do not convey what the negotiator does not really want conveyed or believes. What you are considering, and what you are saying have physiological manifestations - it is this premise upon which "lie detectors," and body language work.

Lie detectors only use a few rudiments - blood pressure, respiration, heart rate, and skin conductivity (sweat). Reading body language is an art; and an art with significant limitations. While you may gauge respiration visually, and thus be able to tell when a person is under stress or tension - shallow rapid breathing - what you cannot not tell is why the stress is present, or what the stress is. Body language is an empirical skill developed by making the conscious decision to analyze people under diverse circumstances. While BP, and skin conductivity are out, fortunately there are a wide spectrum of human mannerisms that convey much. Body position - whether inclined forward in a chair indicating intense interest, and tension, or reclined indicating relaxation, and mental ease; speech rate - speech delivered more rapidly than normal indicating tension, or intense commitment, jeopardy, or fear, while normal slow deliberate delivery may indicate confidence, surety, and pre-knowledge of coming future events; speech inflection - fear, anger, loss of control, questioning, or assumption of a new and, perhaps, previously un-held paradigm; body appendage mannerisms - head position, facial expressions, finger, hand, and arm movements and gesticulation, posture, physical body shift, or leg/foot movement.

Two of the most important physical manifestations of body language, and the most difficult for a speaker to control are respiration - respiration may be gauged by watching collar bone/shirt collar movement - and eye flutter. The difficulty of controlling eye flutter is one of the reasons that professional card players often choose to wear sunglasses to mask eye actions while engaged in tournament play. Normal non-stressed eye blink rate is quite slow 6 - 20 blinks per minute. Internal stress causes blink-rate to rise almost immediately to 30 - 70 blinks per minute depending upon the magnitude of the stress. To illustrate return to the CNN Anderson Cooper interview link in John's message above. Note Cooper's blink rate, and furrowed brow, throughout most of the interview, with only brief moments of relief, apparently while he formulates a question. The split screen permits us to Compare Cooper to Drew Griffin. Griffin conveys, with little or no personal stress, what has taken place to Cooper. Cooper receives the message with a great deal of stress. While I can't know why Cooper is under stress, the stress is so acute in this interview that it causes Cooper to shift position, and his head inclination several times through the interview. The only time Cooper's eye flutter slows and shows an absence of tension is when he asks his first question "... just what, specifically, are they being asked to keep quiet about..." Drew's response is, initially, received by Cooper with only modest stress. As the incredible nature of the report continues, as conveyed in the facial expression and voice inflection of Griffin's response,Cooper exhibits an increasing level of discomfort, as noted through blink rate, body shift, and facial expressions throughout the remainder of the interview; thus illustrating an increasingly elevated level of tension.

Body language can tell you what is happening, often independently of the speakers desires, but it can't tell you the underlying why. For those who desire to engage in "reading" body language - not a exact science - it is vital to observe, and note the body mannerisms of those of interest, especially when they are known to be lying to someone else. Lies are usually times of great stress; often the moment a lie is conveyed there are very specific indicators - elevated blink rate, shallow rapid respiration, inability to look at the listener - the speaker will look away and down -, inability to look away from the listener, physical finger, hand, arm, or leg movement, facial expression(s), dry lips, jaw muscle tension, looking down their nose at the listener, an aggressive stance, or a passive stance. These indicators are different for each individual but they will tell you very specifically that the person is under stress and may be lying - these indicators are usually involuntary and unknown to the person lying; as such they are beyond the control of the person lying. The indicators that are present when someone is lying do not guarantee that when you see them, what you may be being told or are hearing is a lie, but it does guarantee that what you are being told is causing the speaker great stress. Before continuing it must be said that there are some who are so proficient at lying - or have no conscience, clinical sociopaths - that they are unstressed by their lies, and thus exhibit no body language manifestation of stress at all when lying- these people can only be isolated as liars by verifying, outside of a conversation, that what they have told you is not the truth. Nothing these people tell you can be accepted at face value as there will be no manifestation of stress in their body language when lying.


For those who are interested there are several books on negotiating that are helpful; and specifically, regarding body language, there is an old book that is quite helpful in getting started, but is just a beginning - the book is: How to Read a Person Like a Book - http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Person-L ... ike+a+book

There is no substitute for a sincere interest, and time spent practicing is vital, as everyone's body language is somewhat different. It is often sufficient just to know that what you are speaking with someone about causes them stress.

NoOneImportant

Re: 29-Oct-13 WV-New Zealand/U.S. resume military cooperatio

Post by NoOneImportant »

Regarding the body language particular to Obama when he is lying: his lips are moving, and noise is coming out of his mouth. Bwaahahahaha, a little bit of humor helps the medicine go down :D

NoOneImportant

Re: 29-Oct-13 WV-New Zealand/U.S. resume military cooperatio

Post by NoOneImportant »

Guest wrote:
At least we know he has good medical coverage for that.
True, and we know that it isn't Obamacare!

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