By screwing over us for short term gain, you will screw over yourself and your childrens' grandchildren.  Is that discount really worth your freedom and your future?  I hope you can count the cost of the unseen, as well as the seen.

http://rense.com/general96/horrible.html

"Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional. What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected.

To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats and the media are saying. The law does provide for rationing of health care, particularly where senior citizens and other classes of citizens are involved, free health care for illegal immigrants, free abortion services, and probably forced participation in abortions by members of the medical profession.

The Bill will also eventually force private insurance companies out of business, and put everyone into a government run system. All decisions about personal health care will ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats, and most of them will not be health care professionals. Hospital admissions, payments to physicians, and allocations of necessary medical devices will be strictly controlled by the government.

However, as scary as all of that is, it just scratches the surface. In fact, I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of providing affordable health care choices. Instead it is a convenient cover for the most massive transfer of power to the Executive Branch of government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated. If this law or a similar one is adopted, major portions of the Constitution of the United States will effectively have been destroyed.

The first thing to go will be the masterfully crafted balance of power between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. The Congress will be transferring to the Obama Administration authority in a number of different areas over the lives of the American people, and the businesses they own.

<snip>

This legislation also provides for access, by the appointees of the Obama administration, in direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, of all of your personal healthcare information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital. All of this is a protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures. You can also forget about the right to privacy. That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd and 4th Amendments may provide.

If you decide not to have healthcare insurance, or if you have private insurance that is not deemed acceptable to the Health Choices Administrator appointed by Obama, there will be a tax imposed on you. It is called a tax instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid application of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment. However , that doesn’t work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving someone of property without the due process of law.

<snip>

This is not about health care; it is about seizing power and limiting rights. Article 6 of the Constitution requires the members of both houses of Congress to “be bound by oath or affirmation to support the Constitution.” If I was a member of Congress I would not be able to vote for this legislation or anything like it, without feeling I was violating that sacred oath or affirmation. If I voted for it anyway, I would hope the American people would hold me accountable."

State site is still down.  Anyone actually been able to get a quote?

You don't have a case, and you don't understand my ideology.

As an aside, years ago I produced a version of single payer healthcare that would actually work, not cost much in taxes, and could have been a workable compromise between the unmitigated disaster that we face now and an unregulated free market system.  I presented that plan on this forum as well as others.  Feel free to search for it.

The problem with it, that I could see in advance, is that it was too simple.  There wouldn't really have been any way to game the system, and the beaucracy would have been minimal.  Less even than what exists for medicaid or medicare, and it could have compeltely replaced those structures.

Heres the one rule for government funded healthcare...

If the medical procedure, product or drug was commercially available in the United States 50 years ago; it could be 100% deductable on either personal or corporate income taxes.

That's it.  If someone who can't pay enters the emergency room for a real emergency, they get immediate care like they do already, and have for decades.  If they need followup care, such as for a broken leg, that can be provided by a great many clinics; public or private, so long as they use methods that have been shown to exist fifty years prior.  Private hospitals could take those costs incured directly off their taxes, private corporations could reduce their tax burden by sponsoring free clinics to do these kinds of things.

But if you need or want medical care that wasn't available by 1953, you're still going to want private insurance.  No codine, sorry.  Take four asprin, they're free.  Polio vaccine if you want it, on the taxpayer's dime; but you'd need to pay for the flu vaccine.

But, you see, it's not really about affordable health care.  It's about redistribution of wealth under the disguse of insurance.  The truth is that most of the real health care that people get, emergency or otherwise, before 40 years of age is both routine and relatively inexpensive to provide, when paid for out of pocket and out of the context of an insurance risk pool.  Think about how much it really costs to x-ray and set a child's broken arm.  No part of this process is technology that is more recent than my own birth.  While Mom & Dad might feel compeled to upgrade Junior's painkillers or get a waterproof swimming cast, those are not actually health care requirements; those are electives.

The geratest irony is that this redistribution of wealth isn't from the rich to the poor.  It's mostly from the young & healthy to the old & infirm.  Pretty much how Social Security has been hammering all of us for longer than I've been alive.  In other words, you're going to be paying for my care subsidy in a couple more years; since I have a degenerative genetic disease that has managed to kill off half of my father's siblings before age 60, and will likely be forced off my corporate health care family plan and into the exchanges during the next union contract negotiation.  I would say thank you, but I understand that I'm also screwing over my own children in this process.

The Federal Controlled Substances Act is the law as well.

The Federal Reserve Act is the law as well.

The bank bailout is the law as well.

I, for one, choose to oppose bad laws.  Just like my great-great-grandfather chose to oppose the Fugitive Slave Act by participating in the "Underground Railroad" by hiding fugitive slaves in a root cellar in his home, in the downtown Portland district of Louisville, Kentucky; before they were to swim or run across the Ohio River Bridge into Indiana.  The ACA is a raw deal, for you included.  You just don't understand it yet.  My greatest fear is that you, and those like you, won't understand until it's too late to prevent the inevitable economic effects.  Effects that no one can completely understand or predict.

Even though Roberts sided with the idea that the mandate fee is a tax, that means the entire act is still unconsittutional.  I'm still wondering why the Republicans haven't brought this part up, but the constitution requires that any tax, revenue or spending bill must originate in the House of Representatives.  The Senate can modify it and return it to the house, but they can't start there.  The version of the Affordable Care Act that was "deemed passed" (not actually passed) was the Senate version.  By declaring the mandate legal under Congresses power to tax, the Supreme Court had to declare it a tax.  I can imagine Roberts sitting there thinking 'I sent you guys back a soft pitch! What the hell are you waiting on?!'  The Repubs can destroy this act anytime they see fit.

It may seem that way, but that is not the reality.  It's a beautiful irony that, although the Affordable Care Act requires that all providers on the exchanges offer to cover pre existing conditions, there is nothing that requires them to do it for free.  Already one guy with a pre-existing condition, who can't get health care otherwise, managed to get a premium quote from his state exchange.  It was $33K per year in premiums alone, not counting the deductible and co-pay.  This was after the subsidy, too.  How about that trash?  I can't even get on my state exchange to see how I would fare, because it's been down since about 10 am.

A better question, is would "crimes against personal freedom" be considered a violent crime?  If it is not in Germany, that's enough to move the numbers to nearly even, since kidnapping is certainly counted as a violent crime.  I'm pretty sure that any of those "crimes against personal freedom" would be a catagory of violent crime here.  Definitions matter a great deal in the context of statistics.  How can we even compare countries that report the same crime as entirely different classes of crimes?


Okay, would those be considered violent crimes?  They are here.  I'm gaining new insight into why it is that European nations appear so safe statisticly, while the US appears so violent.  It seems to be, in part, because your governments don't regard some common types of social crimes to be violent in nature, while ours generally do.  If someone called you on the phone and threatened you with bodily harm, would the threat alone be a violent crime in Germany?  It would in Kentucky, and I'm pretty sure that's generally true in the United States.  I know it's also true in California, Ohio, Indiana & Tennessee at least.  It's likely to be true in every state that my Kentucky State Deadly Weapons Permit is honored, which today is well over half of all of the states last I checked.

Shutdown or not, Obamacare begins in six hours.  Even the deliberate removal of the funding from the "budget" wouldn't matter.  They haven't passed a budget in five years, so I don't know why it would matter now anyway.  Go sign up for your doctor hunting license, and see if you can catch one when you need one.

http://www.kentuckystatepolice.org/pdf/cik_2012.pdf

Here is the link to the comparable document for Kentucky.  Interestingly, they don't produce a crime rate, only an absolute number of offences.  For all of Kentucky during 2012, the total number of crimes that are considered violent (i.e. Assault, Homicide, Kidnapping, Robbery, and Rape) is 36,965.  According to Wikipedia, Kentucky's population was 4,380,415 on July 1, 2012.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky#Demographics)

36,965 /4,380,415 = 0.0084386981598775 or 843.9 per 100K.  Did I do that right?

According to page 2 of your submitted document, total violent crime in Germany was 195,143 in 2012. This includes, as stated, Murder & Manslaughter, Rape & violent sexual crimes, Robberies, and Dangerous Bodiliy Injury (which I will assume is comparable to assault here).  No mention of kidnapping, is that not a crime in Germany?

According to Wikipedia again, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany) Germany had a population of 80,219,695 during the official census of 2011.  Which seems the most current numbers available, so we'll run with that.

 195,143 / 80,219,695 = 0.0024326071047765 or 243.3 per 100K.

Assuming we have good numbers, and there is no reason that I can see to assume we do not, and assuming I did that correctly, (I'm sure that if I did not, someone will mention it) we would have to assume that a German is about a quarter as likely to be a victim of a violent crime, randomly speaking, than a Kentuckian.  I must say, I did not expect that outcome.

EDIT::  Wait, brandishing a firearm isn't a crime?  Undoubtedly that number is too low to be relevent, but what else isn't part of German crime stats?  If you pull out a weapon to threaten another person here, that's already assualt even if the threat is hollow.  If you threaten someone bodily harm over the phone, it's terroristic threatening, which is a violent crime here also, filed under the catargory of assault.

EDIT2: Wow, I didn't know there was such an epidemic of kidnappings in Kentucky.  Another damn good reason to own a handgun.  Not enough to alter the overall outcome even if Germany's kidnapping rate was as bad, though.  I also noticed that both violations of gun possession regulations (i.e. getting caught with a handgun in public without a permit to carry) or getting caught with a gun in your possession while committing a federal drug violation (i.e. caught growing pot in the woods, and there is a shotgun in your truck) is almost always (I say almost, because I'm sure it's not a perfect corrolation) an automatic charge of assualt of a police officer.  There are certainly enough drugs and guns in Kentucky to make that combonation into a data changer, but I have no way of filtering out the real crimes here from the charges that police stack up on a perp.  These stats are not convictions, so the charges alone would contribute to the "crime rate".

That all sounds like you've done some research on the topic.  Sure, the US gun death toal is pretty high, but did you know that if you remove the statistics that come from cities of greater than 250K, the gun death rate is lower than in The UK, Australia, Russia or France?  Even if you remove the gun death total from those same large cities as well.  I'm not talking murder rates either, I'm talking about deaths from firearms.  If we were to include murder by blunt or sharp weapons of opprotunity, The British Isles don't look so civilized anymore.  Even Germany wouldn't look so good anymore.  If one considers just the rate of violent crimes overall, and not just those involiving a death, The UK already is higher than the United States even without removing major cities from the mix.  Australia isn't far behind, either; and Russia has been well over the US since the fall of the Soviet State.  You don't hear about such statistics because they really don't support the agenda of groups that tend to use such arguments.

It is not the place of politicians, or anyone else, to "fix" the social problems.  Those problems are the direct results of culture clashes, in large part; and are concentrated in areas where those cultures overlap.  This isn't Germany, so there is no way the US is ever going to be able to enforce a prohibition on parrallel cultures.  (We can argue about whether it really works for Germany some other time)

That all said, if we were to do an honest comparison between Europe and the US, we would be comparing individual US States to individual European States.  Comparing the US as a whole to individual EUropean states is deception, and a comparison of the US overall against Europe overall would have to include the Eastern former block countries, and Europe would look far worse than it should in reality, would it not?  If we were to compare very civilized & modern Germany to, let's say, my home state of Kentucky, how do you think that Germany would fare?  Germany does not permit personally owned firearms.  Ketucky is one of the most weaons permissive states in the United States, including the registration & licesning of Class III weaponry (Military arms; I.E. fully automatic machine guns, armor piercing rounds, incidiary rounds, explosives and weaponized vehicles such as tanks, silencers etc.)  If you've got the funds & a clean criminal record, you can get it here.

REally, I want to know how that woulc play out.  I'd be willing to wager that Germany looks more dangerous than Kentucky, from a violent crime statistics perspective.

Santa was a lie told to small children so they might be more trusting in the presence of old strangers.  Ever notice that a baby is always sceptical of a guy in a santa suit?  That's probably a rational response to old men they don't know.

Go to Youtube and search for the Honey Badger video.  You will know you found the right one, when you have a voiceover from a guy with a high pitched voice who, at one point in the video, "honey badger don't care, honey badger don't give a sh*t"

Of course I was being sarcastic.  I know that there is no such thing as an out of pocket maximum under the individual market section of the Affordable Care Act.  Those kinds of requirements only apply to employer sponsored plans.


Your primary motivation is noted in my prior paragraph.  BTW, I just checked my paystub for what I pay.  I pay $1.21 per week for a family plan (I have five kids) that pays 80% on everything after the first $2500 (annual deductable) and has an annual out of pocket maximum of $6500. (pays 100% of expenses after I've paid $9000 total in a year, $2500 + $6500)  I have a 'health savings account' attached to it in order to pay for the deductable and out of pocket expenses that I contribute $124.04 per week into.  I hit that max out of pocket every year with five kids, and all total it's still cheaper than the "regular" plan, and if I ever don't hit that max in a year, I keep the difference for health care in my retirement years.

Under the Affordable Care Act, this plan is illegal.  AT a minimum, I'd be taxed an additional $3K or so as a "gold" plan.  I'd be curious if you can find anything of comparable value for my family.  Note, however, that there is no way that I'd be eligible for any kind of subsidy.

EDIT: A regular plan (instead of the HSA/high deductable plan that I use) at my workplace would certainly be a more predictable expense, but the annual costs for me would be closer to $10,500 based on prior years.

Don't forget to ask about the out of pocket deductible and maximum out of pocket annual limit.  Those are the numbers that I'd be most interested it.

Great!  Now I'm hungry again.

I'm okay using the CL in linux, but this is a mac.  I retired the linux boxen so that my homeschooled kids wouldn't have so much trouble adapting to the dominate computer windows model.  I was using BlackboxWM before. I honestly don't understand CL on a mac, and don't have either the time or motivation to learn anymore.  Such as it is, I already found the spot to swap out the wallet.dat files, and when I restarted the client it automaticly rescaned.  Turns out that it was a backup of an older wallet that I already emptied out, so there was nothing left on it.

Only if they are willing to do so at a loss, and the potential for loss is infinite.  And their loss would likely be others' gain.  Let them try.

Excellent.  How do I do it?  Do I need to be a guru to safely do it?  Because if I do, I need a front end with the ability to keep me from making an irreversable error.

But that's just a workaround, and a bit of a cludge as well.  Just because I choose to retire a set of addresses (or my client chooses for me) does not mean I wish to discard those private keys.  I still want those private keys, in the event that someone (accidentally or otherwise) were to send me bitcoins using an old address.  So I never discard the wallet.dat files associated with addresses that I've done business with in the past, even though I do empty their value before I change them.  The only reason that I change them is because I've switched machines, or I've had more than one machine with clients at a time.  When we found out about the wallet.dat stealing virus a couple of years back, I emptied my existing wallet.dat and created a new (encrypted) one simply because I didn't know if my prior one had been exposed or not.  But I still have that wallet.dat for the reasons mentioned.  I really do need a method of merging in old wallets to my current one, even if those addresses are all marked as tainted-do-not-use.