ATLL765

I have to admit all these 'please vote for' threads lately have me thinking about what happens the first time two NJDevs members have a different significant other they want to get votes for in the same contest.

Or worse yet, they, unbeknownst to them, have the SAME significant other that they try to get votes for, lol.

Then please run for president when you turn 35 and dismantle the military and see how that turns out.

The world is full of looney leaders who make even the most "extreme" of our candidates look tame.  They do not have any concept of diplomacy and wish to destroy the united states as well as their other enemies.

What the left doesn't understand is that the world has and will always be filled with wackos and evil and not by understanding people who want to get together to sing Cumbya.  It took the largest and deadliest war in world history to defeat evil manifested as hitler and nazi Germany.  It took over fifty years and many proxy wars but we defeated the soviet union by basically outspending the soviet union to death ( though the liberals will give you varying reasons, I have had the fortune of interviewing several CIA and smaller political leaders during a college project about the cold war and they all say this was the reason why we won).  Either way we won because of our military complex.

Please tell me where I said we should dismantle the military?

My point was that spending more than the next 25-26 countries combined, is unnecessary. We could just outspend everyone. We'd still be #1 in military spending, just not by some retardedly large amount of money. Just like our nuclear arsenal, I don't see the point in having enough to blow the world up 100X over. Isn't being able to blow it up once enough?

I'm not going to argue whether we won the Cold war via spending more money, but even if that is true, it's irrelevant now. We're not fighting a large organized sovereign state. We're fighting a small contingent of under-armed and under-funded guerilla fighters. I'm going to oversimplify here, but we don't need a hammer to win here, we need the precision of a knife. We do not need to spend the amount of money we do on the military/DHS to be safe, that's ridiculous. We could probably cut the military and DHS budget by 50% and be no less safe than we are now.

I know you're gonna bring up the cold war again, so I'll relate that way now. What was the point of overthrowing a fascist regime, only to adopt it's tactics to govern ourselves now?

NEWS FLASH: No new news to report.

Would much rather have single payer as well.

I think it's the clear way to truly lowering costs. When you have a single payer, you have such leverage on costs of treatments because it's a take it or leave it situation. Either take $X for an x-ray or don't do it and you gotta assume that if it's still profitable, it will be done. I know Japan, in the case of x-rays said $X is what we'll pay and the industry responded by pushing manufacturers to create cheaper x-ray machines. I believe this was done by cutting out some of the more advanced and lesser used features on the machines, but that's, again, a trade off you have to make.

Wrong on all accounts.  Prices are not going up because of evil pharmaceutical companies and evil insurers.  You have high demand for an expensive and scarce service.  Prices will most assuredly go up.  There is also no way you can bring down administrative costs in any significant way if there is a third party paying.  Let me put it this way, if I had to personally had to pay for your necessary medical care, I damn well want to know what your doctor visits were for, why you needed that operation, why it cost so much.  That will require a lot of paper work whether that third party is me personally, an insurance company or Uncle Sam.

Rather, what will bring prices down are governmental price controls.  What do you think cutting Medicaid/Medicare reimbursements to doctors is designed to do?  And what happens when you put a price ceiling on something?  You get less supply of that something.

I'd rather have a single payer system anyways. That being said, reimbursements for Medicare need to flattened so that you don't see abuses in the system of people being pushed towards treatments that have higher reimbursement rates. Again, here the argument is flatten the rate, broaden the base. Specialist are overpaid in our system, GPs are underpaid. Shift that so that specialists get less and GPs more and you will have more GPs and greater access. Less specialists could hurt, but usually a bit of a wait to see one isn't gonna kill you and if it is, the GP will let you know and I would hope that there could be a way to allow more needing patients skip in line. I'm over-simplifying, but you get the point.

I have my health insurance through my company and we got a notice late last year that if Obamacare is enacted, expect our premiums to go up approx 30%.  Yup, thats more an $1 increase.

I was obviously using the $1 to make a point, not to say that's what one should expect realistically. I can't speak to your specific case, but on the whole, most increases in costs would have to be coming from what I would have to assume are results of continuing to use private insurers, allowing big Pharma to run this country and any other provisions that were not agreeable to right wingers to bring down administrative costs in the industry.

My main point is that if you took every person in the US, like all 330M of em and averaged their cost of healthcare per year pre Obamacare, including all the people for which it is $0, then the average cost after it is in effect, the average cost will be less than what it was previously.

No, devaman is right about the premium part.

The young are healthy, and have a low premium. The old are not, and have a higher premium. When you expand and virtually put everyone in the same pool, there is a premium average. So with this new pool, you have to see that premiums are higher for the youth and lower for the old, generally.

Do you see what I'm saying?

I totally understand that. For some it will go up, some down. Although, the idea with the younger people not currently buying insurance, $1 is an increase from $0, right? Older people value health insurance more than the young and healthy, for obvious reasons. My point was that, on the whole, the cost of healthcare SHOULD go down. This, however, is contingent on the insurance companies not gouging us people and simultaneously bringing down their administrative costs. The research shows that country's with a universal healthcare policy, pay less as a % of GDP for healthcare, and that's just a FACT, not opinion.

I am sick and tired of the governement telling me what I can and cannot do, especially with my money.  I mean, where does it end?  The long term effects of this ruling can be rather scary when taken to the extreme.  Pretty soon, the government will mandate that everyone in America must buy a car made by an American owned company and mfg'd in the US or face a penalty at the time of purchase of a foreign car of $x because it is in America's interests to keep manufacturing jobs in the US.  This ruling basically says the government can mandate anything they want against individual citizens if the penalty they attach to non-compliance can be considered a tax and there is a legitimate government concern as a basis for the legislation.  

You realize these things are called tariffs, right? It's not at all odd to have a tax on foreign goods to give an advantage to domestic products.

The "ridiculous" austerity measures is what has been keeping Greece and Spain on life-support.  Their system of entitlements are perks to everyone no matter what the cost is the main reason for their mess and they are now all depending on Germany to bail them out.

Sorry but to constantly be taxing and spending with no end in sight, you are bound to pump the well dry and that is what is happening.  There will not always be someone or a nation willing to bail you out every time.

Also if you follow those silly rankings the WHO puts out ranking the nation's healthcare system (and I guess that is where you get the "excellent" part about France) then IDK what to tell you.  All I do know is when a list says Cuba has better healthcare than the US, then I would highly doubt the legitimacy.

The austerity measures are not what's keeping them on life support, it's WHY they're on life support. Read what a real economist has to say on the matter: http://www.nytimes.c...ic-suicide.html

Ok, well, you may not care that a well respected group like the WHO says about healthcare, then I don't know what to tell you. I mean, I'm sorry, but it's fact that Cuba outperforms the US. Do you not believe the statistics on things like infant mortality rates that the WHO puts out? And you can bet a million dollars that if people could, they would buy prescription pills from Cuba just like they do from Mexico and Canada.

The issue in the US has never been that it's lacking in skilled doctors or that it can't perform cutting edge procedures, it's that the cost of that care is prohibitively expensive and when people don't have the insurance, they are forced to use the most expensive avenue of care, ERs. The argument for universal healthcare is nearly IDENTICAL to the right's argument for lowering taxes. Flatten the rates and broaden the base. That is EXACTLY what this bill does, except for healthcare coverage, not taxes. More people paying, a more even rate over the whole of the country.

While it is not the best bill, it's a step in the right direction. What really needs to be controlled is the cost of prescriptions, i.e. pills that are $5 here and $1 in the rest of the world, and providing a reasonable fee schedule for procedures performed.

That's in theory.  We all know nice theories often lead to bad execution, especially when the government is involved.

Also go ask how Greece, France and Spain with their entitlement systems that include universal health care.

Ok I'm done now.  This really belongs now in the politics forum as Daniel pointed out before.

You can't cherrypick the bad and leave out the good here. Greece and Spain were fvcked not because of healthcare, but rather the ridiculous austerity measures put in place. Spain, if anything, is proof that the right's idea to cut, cut, cut, will not work. France, has an excellent healthcare system and I'm pretty sure they spend at best 60% what we do on healthcare as a % of GDP, something like 9-10%, when we spend like 17% of GDP.

Ok, I think everybody's getting a little over excited and the whole you're a jerk because *insert tragedy here* is silly. Everyone's had awful things happen to them in their life and maybe Bartholomew Hunt's was a little fresh in his mind and he got a bit over upset. Cut the guy some slack.

To be on topic here, there's no real evidence of to prove either Drew Doughty to be a rapist or not, so I don't think it's fair to make assumptions based on what little there has been reported up to now. If she did get raped, that's a travesty and Doughty should be tried, convicted and spend a ton of time in the PC ward of a Prison where he can pray that no one beats the living sh!t out of him. If she's lying and just trying to get some fame/cash outta this, this is ridiculous and she should be punished as such./Thread

I'm going to get thoroughly wasted. It worked for a game in the last series, or at least I think it was last series, I don't really remember.

On train commute home back from NY to Metropark, I asked the man sitting in the middle seat beside his daughter (windowside) to sit in the last remaining seat of a three seater. He jokingly said "Yes.... unless you're a Devils fan"

I sat down and looked at him and said, "I am."

Haha. I hadn't noticed his varisty style L.A Kings jacket, and his two kids and wife sitting in the next row until now. He was a really nice guy, and we began talkin' about hockey (he's a season ticket holder) and life in general. We compared our teams and how similarly they play, right down to how similar their arenas are. I said, "Once you get to Newark, stay with the crowd and don't venture out too far from the Pru center."

He replied, "Sounds just like L.A"

Mutual respect goes a long way, because at the end of the day we're all just hockey fans.

I know people joke around about this, but I don't like that even us NJ fans still have to sh!t on Newark all the time. Don't wander to far from the Pru? Why? You afraid of something? It's fairly safe all the way from University Heights all the way down to the Ironbound. I'm not worried unless I get above 1st. Except for Elizabeth/Clinton Ave, it's not that bad at all near the downtown area. Market street could be better, but it's not bad and they always have that police tower this on the corner as well. I'm NEVER worried when I'm in Newark. People, for the most part since anything CAN happen, are not gonna walk up to you and beat you down or rob you in the downtown area.

Did you hear what Tortorella said?

Time was that this would be the opening line to a predictable joke, because as everyone knows, John Tortorella doesn’t say much that actually contributes to the national dialogue — about hockey, or any activity equally pertinent to our lives.

D'Alessandro: John Tortorella, the hockey-coach parody, is better off keeping quiet

Thought everyone might get a kick out of this. His press conference wasn't too bad last night, but he still said absolutely nothing of use to any of the media besides offering up the solution the Rags problems by saying they need to have the puck more often. I mean, it's funny to watch sometimes, but it really is a bit childish when he refuses to answer perfectly reasonable questions from members of the media who are just trying to do their jobs.

I think it may take more than just a couple games - look at how long it took Zach & Kovy to have full confidence their bodies. I would just hate for everyone to flip out & berate him if ten games in he wasn't up to speed and producing.

Having said that......, (ala curb your enthusiasm) I CAN'T WAIT to see Zajac back at it again!!

I think that sounds pretty...pretty good, lol.

I agree with everyone here. The guy is a dirty hit factory. Loves to throw sneaky elbows when the other guy isn't looking, yet still thinks he's a world class guy. Screw him. I hope his career's over.