Timewaster's Guide Archive

I suppose I can see what you're saying and I agree...to a point. You summed up Perrin pretty acurately with "grr". Maybe that's why he started off as my favorite character but now not so much. Mat on the otherhand has definately become, far and away, the most interesting/complex character out of the group. I agree the death of Tylin kind of got shoved aside and buried but that in no way diminshes his complexity. Some of my favorite scenes are of him stumbling his way through his attempted relationship with Tuon and Aludra(for a little bit). He is steadily going from the reluctant hero to a full on hero. His steadily increasing awareness of his importance/responsibility in stopping the Dark One is IMO the best character arc in the story. As, for Rand he is conciously trying to become a "one-trick pony". He actively tries to avoid feeling anything. So, his attempt to become more emotionally wooden is well....making him wooden.

Remember when DC and Marvel did Amalgam comics and had characters from each side fight each other? Well instead of Wolverine vs. Batman they could do Beast(via Beauty and the...) vs Wolverine or Jafar vs. Mr. Sinister. Or how about Aladdin vs. Gambit? The possibilities are endless.....

I wouldn't take you on that bet C.M.  Some lawyer is probably salivating over it already.  And it doesn't matter if you can't afford a lawyer; there are plenty of Plaintiff's attorneys who work on commission.  They won't charge you a cent unless you recover, but then they can be compensated for 25% (or a lot higher percentage dending on the state) of the damage award.  They'll probably sue the taser manufacturor as well.

Of course, I'm not so sure how successful Mr. Idiot would be.  He did run from the police and then try to kick and bite the cops tackling him.

Exactly. Of course they may be able to buy him off with a lifetime supply of spray paint.... Wow thats sad.

Yes, that would work, because everyone is full of compassion and will be standing in line to pay the government more than the government says they should.

So, then the government should force us to pay into anything they say is "good" for us then?

I already explained how it benefits you. When you get sick, someone else pays for you.

I also responded that it wouldn't work that way. There are simply those who will never contribute to the pool. Thus, never paying for me in return.

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I am not entirely confident in the government's ability to make it work, but the free-market healthcare system has FAILED.

As I have said more than once in this thread, with examples, we haven't had a truly free-market healthcare system in DECADES.

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It's laughable to blame the current healthcare woes on government intervention when executives and stockholders are making enormous amounts of cash.

Can't quite see the connection here.  Sounds more like class envy/warfare than anything else.  People are making enormous amounts of cash therefore those people are evil?

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People are getting hurt, but no one's breaking the law, so we should leave the law the way it is and not change it? No. The law must be changed.

Agreed.  The law should be changed.  In fact, I couldn't agree more.  Several thousand federal regulations on healthcare should be stricken from the books. Take it back to an actual free market system and you will see prices for medical procedures as well as insurance plans drop and the range of care and types of insurance plans available multiply a thousandfold.

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Thinking that shareholders and corporate execs will make life better for everyone if left to their own devices is foolishness beyond the extreme.

Agreed. Fortunately for me, that's not exactly the point I'm trying to make.  That point is this:  If you connect covering everyone directly to making money, which is the very definition of a true free-market system, then everyone gets covered. In the current state of things the government has made it expensive and in many cases illegal to offer plans tailored to high-risk or special cases.

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I do believe Healthcare should be an inalienable right.

We'll have to agree to disagree here I suppose.  I simply can't in good conscience insist that my neighbor pay for my healthcare.

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I think technology and society have progressed to the point where that's possible and practical. Many countries are making it work.

They're not actually.  Every case I've looked up, Canada, England, France, etc... are unsustainable financially.  Why they are unsustainable is wide open to debate, and they aren't actually working.

The underlying problem with giving everyone something for free is that nothing is actually free.  Everything costs something.  Putting the government in charge of a 'healthcare for everyone' system simply means that you're extracting the money for the system from private citizens at the point of a gun and then filtering that money through the government and lying about it being free.  Insisting that the government is the only entity that can run an intelligent healthcare system flies in the face of every single bit of my life experience.

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Even if there is no government-run plan, we need to ban making a profit on health insurance. Everyone should be forced to buy coverage, and insurance companies should return all excess profits beyond a reasonable buffer to their policyholders at the end of the year.

Wow.  Just, wow.  This philosophy didn't work in communist russia, it didn't work in china, it hasn't worked anywhere. But I suppose we could try again with starry eyes and hearts full of hope.

Conclusion:  Yes, it would be possible to create a state-run health insurance/health care system that paid for itself and encouraged innovation, efficiency, and customer service.  The nature of government and bureaucracies themselves work against it though.  And the current plan on the table does none of the above.

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Who ranks...? the world health organization, a part of the UN

First, keep in mind that places like Oman and Colombia rank above the US.  That says something about how they run those rankings does it not?  And have a look at this.

Skar, You. Are.My.Hero. I was going to respond in similiar fashion but you beat me to the punch and said much better than they way I had it down.

The username I use here and everywhere else was created by myself. It's in reference to the feeling you get after being awake for an unhealthy amount of time. You know that your mind just isn't right and you begin to bable about nonsense but it just doesn't matter. I created the name after me and a buddy of mine stayed up for 56 hours straight. Not a record by any means but I could literally sense my sanity beginning to slip but I was Comfortable in my Madness.