smccrory

Now this is just a screw up no matter how you slice it: Immigrants baffled by HealthCare.gov lapse (from @AP) http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_289563/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=7voqtVYQ

Yay, a holiday of fear.

Thanks, I appreciate the info!

Speaking of, I've had a fascination with that pistol since it came out. I owned a series of 1911s 20 years ago and got pretty good with my Colt Mk IV Combat Elite, until I traded out of the .45 round for more capacity. But I still enjoy that round and wouldn't mind a target/home defense pistol that'll also conceal in cooler clothes. What are your impressions of the XDs45? Much overlap with a 92FS or an LCP?

LOL. "Farmer, farmer, farmer!"

You can assume the best, or assume the worst, but the reality is likely in between. I'm betting the Prez voiced quiet support to protesters already deeply emotionally invested, while reminding them that their real goal should be peaceful and political.

I shot one years ago. Fun, economical little pistol really well-suited to medium-to-shorter hands like mine. I'm tempted but already have what I need. GLWS!

Agreed. Been a while since I read that one.

Risk Pooling is a super-important concept to understand fully, to know how any insurance policy works. It's also critical, to even start to comprehend what universal healthcare (or it's watered-down versions called the ACA and Romney's Massachusetts plan) address. Unfortunately though I've been in the financial I.T. industry for 15 years, I don't have the time to really do the topic justice on an online forum with highly varied starting points of understanding, but I'll try to lay out the skinny in the hopes it forwards the understanding of even a few. Sorry if that comes off as paternal, but working in the industry, I see massive gaps of understanding between how risk pools work and the wildly incorrect assumptions that others have, leading to anti-productive conversations over political and regulatory policy. With that, here goes. Let's first define a risk pool. Wikipedia's first line is good enough: "A risk pool is one of the forms of risk management mostly practiced by insurance companies. Under this system, insurance companies come together to form a pool, which can provide protection to insurance companies against catastrophic risks such as floods, earthquakes etc. The term is also used to describe the pooling of similar risks that underlies the concept of insurance. While risk pooling is necessary for insurance to work, not all risks can be effectively pooled. In particular, it is difficult to pool dissimilar risks in a voluntary insurance bracket, unless there is a subsidy available to encourage participation.[1]" Now let's define who are effectively in the U.S. healthcare risk pools: In America, if you have an insurance policy, you are a member of its risk pool. You premium pays for not only what the actuaries expect your policy-lifetime costs to be (plus a profit to the insurance company of course), but also for the pooled costs of everyone in that policy. That also means that the young and healthy pay not only for their own expected costs, but for the massive number of baby boomers who are living longer than the system expected, and are accounting for the vast majority of health care costs with an average of 5 or more chronic conditions. It's cruel irony that the Greatest Generation is now placing the highest burden on health care costs, but hey, that's what risk pools are about. And to even out the costs, it's absolutely critical that you get lots of young people to join the pool and pay premiums to reduce the aggregate risk concentration. Now, what if you don't have insurance? Who pays for that? You already know the answer... As a country we've decided not to withhold emergency care. If you present to an E.R. or call 911 with a life-threatening condition, Hospitals are required (with few exceptions) to at least stabilize you because we have adopted a national identity of at least that level of sympathy. This is true for every class, race, gender, sexual preference, intelligence level, political party, and yes, citizenship status. Now, think about who presents to the ER: They're not just auto accident victims, but more regularly they're people who let their health go too long, usually because they didn't have preventative and mitigative healthcare insurance coverage. And since they were not in a private risk pool, they default to the national pool. In other words, medical support was too expensive for them when they were just a little sick, and now that they're chronic, it's time for the public to pay exponentially higher expenses. So the actuarial math problem exists whether a person wants to believe in math or not (it's a lot like physics in that regard :-)). Without an individual mandate, the public is left to pay for chronic, life-threatening conditions at the end of years of personal neglect arising from no preventative care. I sometimes think of it as an accident chain, like when you don't visit a dentist for a decade and end up with severe tooth decay and cardiac-related stress from infection compensation. Or when an "illegal" mother fails to bring their kid to a physician because she can't afford the checkup on under-the-table seasonal migrant pay, if she can even get care in the first place, thus presenting the child to the ER once a condition degrades to that point. Again, without private risk pool membership, the membership defaults to the national pool where costs are far, far higher and visits are repeated.

I bet the DNC would LOVE the GOP to try rounding up people into busses en masse on national TV.

Except for hat wearers. Fuck hat wearers - at least half of all crime is committed by people who own hats.

https://nilc.org/dreamsummary.html So, send high school graduates who grew up in America (I bet some speaking English better than many on this board) to a country they never knew, and instead accept others who's only merit by your rule is being born within the borders?

You still didn't answer the question about Dreamers without a homeland.

No, they already get free healthcare in the form of the ER. Legitimize them into full citizens and they'll be mandated to pay premiums for preventative care and thus avoid chronic condition care delivered by the ER at the end of a disease chain like the rest of us. Plus they're young, so you'll be catching them in the least expensive phase of their lives.

Amen to that. Hate only brings more hate which brings more hate.

Magz is talking about Dreamers, and there's going to be an ugly bottom to this logical string. There always is with isolationists.

Or actually get creative... Legitimize Dreamers with a GOP-backed immigration reform and convert them (especially Latinos) into republicans. But you and I both know that conservative xenophobia will scarcely let that happen.

It won't help, mag. You won't be able to compete with 6 years of programming. When someone is that far off the details, it's because they don't care or are too invested in an opposing position.

Legitimize Dreamers into taxpayers, then why not?

Hopefully the OR veterans here know what I'm say'n [emoji2]

Could be worse, could be a congressman representing the U.S.

^This. He's no Rodney King. Shit, he's not even Trayvon. Sure, the popo asshatted the situation initially, but it's long been time for social justice ambulance chasers to go home and let this one go. Plenty enough for everyone to learn from and move on IMHO.

Frankengrom, in a good way!

You got something against mutants? Some of them are kinda hot.