Quoting Salon is like quoting the Democratic National Committee. Nothing but Liberal claptrap and it seems to have skewed your view of my country.

Aww, relax, we're going to have some grown-ups running the government for a change. Well, maybe not the President, but so far, his cabinet is solid. All proven leaders and successful people, not chosen because they make the cabinet look diverse.

Take a read through the election thread, have a look at the discussions there...and then think about the responses you expect to get to a statement like that in General Topics.

it costs a lot to cover a family of four with medical, vision and dental.

thank you for the info

I'll read up on it

Of course, I didn't take into consideration that it's not a state or local government defined rate. One thing I will concede in regards to our health service is that things like dental and vision are generally not covered by the National Insurance rate, so when I eventually go back to the dentist or opticians I will have to pay for this, and the rates are, not particularly low. There are options on the table for those on the social and that, but for the most part you do have to pay. So there's that. Obviously we have health insurance over here too which also (sometimes) can go towards those kinds of bills, and you do also have to pay a flat rate for prescription medicine unless you meet certain criteria, for example if you have a specified medical condition and have a valid medical exemption certificate, these conditions include diabetes, epilepsy, cancer and/or other physical conditions which prevent you from going outside without assistance. Also, if you reach pension age then prescriptions are free. The current flat rate is £8.40, which is about 10 dollars per item.
So, your family of four in the UK would have the adult workers pay in their National Insurance contribution, depending on your wage, if the kids are under 16 then the prescriptions are free, so the main thing you'd be paying for would be dental and optical treatments. You can get free eye tests in some places, but actually getting the lenses and frames, you're probably looking at anything up to and over £100 ($123 dollars), as for a dental check-up...off the top of my head, the last time I went (which was too long ago...really need to get back) was between £40-60 ($49-74) so outside of your National Insurance contribution you're looking at about $200 per person per appointment, and that's just basic stuff in regards to the dentist, the opticians would probably be lower for just check-ups, but in regards to lense replacement and that, you're looking at the higher end of the scale obviously.
Now National Insurance contribution rates vary wildly, I don't know what you bring in as a family, so I'll base it on the UK average income which is £26,500 per year ($32,111) which works out at around £2208 a month, which means that the contribution is 13.8% which is £305 approximately. So you're probably looking at around £400-500 per month expenses on medical coverage in the UK for yourself, which is around 20-25%. Of course, the two kids would not need to pay into the NI until they start work, so you can deduct that £305 each for them, but you'd still have to pay for dental and opticians as the need arose and when they get over 16 then you'll also need to pay prescription charges, although if it's long-term medication then you'll usually get enough to cover a months supply, so that's £8.40 per month, depending on the condition of course.

So, at the end of all that rabbit, there's some parity there in our two systems, but there are also some differences, and I must admit I still can't get my head around the American healthcare system, especially when I see some of the hospital bills, and some of the really stupid stuff that people get charged for, but that's something that you tend to only see negative examples of, so that does present a skewed image somewhat.

I will just say though, before clocking off for now, that our system is by no means perfect, and I really cannot stress that enough. We Brits may have a bit of a gloat about it, but at the end of the day there are some pretty big problems facing it at the moment, and a lot of it is down to mismanagement and funding shortages...not to mention the potential for staff shortages post-Brexit (depending on what particular flavour Brexit we get).
That being said, I think that it is a part of the British national identity and if anyone made an overt attempt to privatize it, or attempt to implement some form of fee at the point of service there would be a large uproar over it. :yep:

@ Oberon

As you may or may not be aware, this year my step daughter went to the ER due to complaints of crippling back pain. as it turned out she was passing a kidney stone. She was sent home with pain management medication and antibiotics and advised to return if the pain worsened or persisted.

fast forward two days, the pain returned and was worse than the first go. She was taken back to the ER as directed and an MRI conducted. The doctors discovered that one of the kidney stones had become jammed in her left ureter just long enough to cause urine to back up into the kidney, this, combined with the irritation from the stone passage caused a kidney infection. she was admitted to the hospital here in our home town for a couple of days to manage the condition.

the stone passed, but the infection refused to relent and caused the kidney to abscess. She was transferred to a Children's Hospital about 2 hours drive from home and admitted where she remained for the next 22 days. During that time doctors determined that the offending organism was Klebsiella Bacteria and worked to save the kidney. Ultimately she needed a drain tube inserted through her abdomen into the kidney to allow the abscess fluid to exit the body (Nephrostomy) and we were advised that only a handful of antibiotics would actually work against Klebsiella Bacteria. Eventually she was sent home with a PICC line inserted into the left arm which was meant to feed the antibiotics directly into the circulatory system. This was something we were taught to do here on our own, but for the first few treatments she had a visiting nurse.

I cant complain about our insurance plan too much, we have a better plan than most, but we do pay exorbitantly for it. the final tally on her medical bills rested in the $115,000 range, of which we will be responsible for about $7,000 out of pocket.

Without putting too much of our business our there, my wife realistically only makes about $1,900 a month, her employer offered health care plan is what i would call a "Cadillac" policy. It offers a great many options and coverages. conversely, i out earn my wife many times over, but the employer offered health care plan through my employer is garbage ergo we elect to use her coverage instead of mine... which is why it gobbles up so much of her income.

My in-laws are another example. While self sufficient and proud people, they would be considered "low income" and since they are both "self employed" Obamacare was the only realistic option for them at the time of their enrollment. They couldn't go without insurance, and they certainly couldn't afford to pay the state mandated penalty for going uninsured.

Unfortunately for them, their ACA premiums have increased considerably since their initial enrollment and have expressed disappointment with the coverage compared to the cost. Im certain they are not the only folks in that boat.

I almost lean toward scrapping the ACA altogether and letting free market capitalism run with the ball, when insurers are tripping over their own asses competing for customers the premiums will invariably be reduced. besides... anyone with nary a single dime to spare cannot be turned away from medical treatment - hospitals already receive a ton of tax incentives for treatment of those who are unable to pay as is.

the bottom line is; there's only one big rock, and everyone has to get a piece of the rock. My favored politician is quite simply the one who a. gives me the most access to the rock and b. leaves my piece of the rock most unmolested. :haha:

We just got the numbers for next year's health care costs from my company. Our premiums have gone down and my contribution has gone down but the plan stayed the same.

ACA works for some people at least. :)

There are a few problems with that idea. There was, for the most part, a very much free market capitalism situation in terms of health insurance and health care. The result had been the excesses of the insurance industry, and by extension, the hospital and pharmaceutical industries; the result of letting them have their own lead was ever-increasing and skyrocketing medical care and medicine prices and the exclusion of a very sizable percentage of the population due to the insurance industry's cherry-picking of clients they would accept and the restrictions placed upon those who were accepted in terms of type of care and and the extent to which the industry would cover their clients. Remember, the calls for health care reform were the result of the pretty much unfettered free market capitalism insurance/health care industry, not just a mere political whim. The medical care horror stories heard prior to the ACA were as bad, and maybe even worse, than post ACA. Also remember, taxpayers were already paying for the care of those under-insured or uninsured; many of those people could not afford preventative care and went to ERs usually when their conditions were so far advanced as to require far more extensive, and expensive, care, at taxpayer cost, than if they had been able to seek preventative care. And, speaking of ERs, the ACA has provisions penalizing ERs and hospitals who engage in a sort of "put a band-aid on gunshot wound" sort of care where they do just enough to get the patient out the door, dealing with symptoms rather than causes, resulting in the same patients having to make repeated visits to the ERs, again at a repeated cost to taxpayers. Now ERs who show excessive return visits are required to justify their decisions and are fined if it is shown they take the "easy way out" when dealing with ER patients. As someone who has made a few ER visits in recent years, I can say the thoroughness of treatment post-ACA is noticeable; the 'here's a couple of aspirin, go walk it off' attitude is fading; also, the formerly packed to the gills ER waiting rooms have thinned out very noticeably. Even the Free Clinic in my neighborhood is handling a lot less traffic. The indications are that if you deal with a health problem properly when it is relatively small and relatively inexpensive, the less likely it will have to be dealt with when it is major and very expensive...

The upper management of health care is also an issue; gone are he days when hospitals decisions were made by capable medical practitioners who had at least some empathy for the patients; now, decisions are are made by corporate bean counters who have very, very little to no concern for individual patient care and are more concerned about optimizing profits for shareholders of their corporations and in meeting targets to trigger their own bonuses and perks...

California voters, years ago, in response to skyrocketing insurance rates and hikes, gave the state insurance commissioner the authority to set ceilings for insurance rates and rate hikes for automobile insurance; insurance companies had to justify the need for rates and hikes by presenting all the evidence to justify their increases. When the law passed, the insurers stormed and bellowed, threatening to pull out of CA and never sell policies in the state again. The law went into effect and, lo and behold, the rates not only stabilized, most of them actually went down and there were even rebates. Most of this was due to the greater transparency in the rate setting process, and a lot of it was also due to something the free market didn't provide: competition. While the major companies bellowed and cursed, smaller companies were able to compete as they filled the voids left by the larger companies. Consumers had far more choices and the big companies began to relent: California is a huge consumer market and the majors could not afford to lose their shares. The experience with the auto insurance industry has led to attempts to put healthcare insurance under the same requirements, but has so far been unsuccessful; the major companies, with their lobbying clout, have thus far been able to dodge and/or suppress any effort to make them as responsible for their actions as are the auto insurers. Maybe it will change soon; the November 2016 ballot had a measure putting e-cigarettes under some of the same law as regular cigarettes and the tobacco industry spent a whopping US $71+ million dollars to defeat the measure and lost by a a result of 64% in favor of the taxation of e-cigs against 36% against; more and more it seems big money is having less and less influence, at least in some states; how this will change, now that Daddy Warbucks is in charge, remains to be seen, but he has already indicated he wants to allow some facets of the ACA to remain intact, and not just minor aspects...



<O>

Interesting bit of redundancy there. Since a Senator must be at least thirty years of age, after twenty years he or she will be at least fifty. You can't run for the House unless you're twenty-five, so "any age" will again be at least fifty after twenty-five years of service.

Maybe they just wanted to be extra sure...
:rotfl2:

I wonder if they credit other government or military service time towards that total?

Egads...well, that's one of the advantages we have here, you wouldn't have had to have paid a thing for that. That I'm aware of anyway, but the flipside is that you probably have a lot shorter waiting times for routine operations than here. However since she went through ER then I imagine they would have been fairly quick about it. I had abdomen pains about this time last year, had a horrid feeling that it was gall stones since my mother had had to have an op to remove her gall bladder the previous year and the pain I had was in the same region as the pain she had with her stones. Thankfully it turned out to have probably been trapped wind (which has no business being that painful), but for a little while the docs were unsure if it was my appendix and so I was pencilled in for a removal op which would have been done probably within 24 or so hours if we hadn't have both figured out that it was just trapped wind.
So the framework was there to get me into a quick operation as needed.
Again though, flipside, I don't live in an area which is too heavily populated and so our hospital probably isn't as overcrowded as the inner city ones.
It's all pros and cons really, I couldn't honestly stand up hand on heart and say that your daughter would have received better care in our healthcare system because I don't have the relevant data available to make that comparison, but with something like that...well, money is of a secondary concern at the time isn't it. :yep:

Yes they do. Just like for every federal employee, federal service and military service do count. Double dipping regulations still apply.

So Trump was only joking when he said...
 

that he was going to "Drain the Swamp"

http://video.foxnews.com/v/525726933...#sp=show-clips

The clip is fun to watch, Lots of weaseling.

So exactly what did he promise again? :doh:

At 30% he's got it good. I pay 50% of my take home pay for insurance with a $3,000 deductable. Unless something just about kills me, half my income vanishes with no possible benefit. as I have to pay for the service ANYWAY.

I pay more for insurance than the combination of the highest house payment plus the highest car payment I've ever made in my life. I could drive a new Mercedes and have enough left over for gas. I'd never WANT to drive a Mercedes though....

http://i.imgur.com/h68Lcf2.png

http://img.memecdn.com/what-could-po..._o_5802169.jpg

Just like the strange weather ... the cold war is starting to heat up. :yep:

Standard nuclear modernisation, Obama began it with SSBN-X, GBSD, NGB and the B61 programs, so nothing exactly new.

UK may want to look at it's nuclear deterent - 40 RVs/SSBN and 120 total is not exactly first class nowadays.

Eh, it'll do, it's not as if we'll ever use it.