The Malaysian military radar showed an unidentified plane without a flight plan fly across their country and over the Indian Ocean. The radar operators didn't notice it. So they missed the opportunity to send up fighter jets to find out what the fuck was going on.

Instead they were were searching the wrong sea, on the east of Malaysia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03...
Series of Errors by Malaysia Mounts, Complicating the Task of Finding Flight 370
By KEITH BRADSHER and MICHAEL FORSYTHE
MARCH 15, 2014

I don't trust you. I trust the doctors who know their patients better than you do. And I trust researchers who have actually talked to poor people in the projects and gone over their budgets, better than I trust you.

I've been to New Orleans. It's one of the least segregated parts of the formerly Confederate south, and it's still pretty segregated. You reduced the black population to slavery and post-slavery servitude, and you complain when they don't show personal initiative.

As George Bernard Shaw said, "The American makes the negro his bootblack, and then demonstrates his inferiority by pointing out that he is a bootblack."

(I may be wrong about the "formerly.")

You don't know that they're poor. There are a lot of middle-class projects, where people have good jobs and pay market-rate rents.

There was a sociologist named Elliott Liebow who answered the question he was always getting, "Why don't these negroes get jobs instead of hanging out on street corners all the time?" His answer was, most of them do have jobs. The negroes you see hanging out of the street corners during the day have jobs in the evening (and weekends). If you go to a restaurant in the evening, you need a cook there in the evening, right?

We mandate lots of things that aren't in the US constitution.

As Adam Smith said, when you benefit from a society, you have an obligation to pay the costs of running that society.

Adam Smith knew about epidemics. We have to cooperate to build hospitals that care for everyone as a last resort. It would be nice if everybody contributed those costs voluntarily.

But they don't. Some people become freeloaders. They know we're going to have to take care of them whether they pay their share or not, so they don't pay. A few freeloaders can encourage everybody to stop cooperating. Then we won't have hospitals for anybody. So if the freeloaders don't pay, we have to make them pay.

If you had a 4-year-old child who got cancer, whose life could only be saved by a $100,000 drug, you'd be demanding that the government, or somebody, give your child that drug. http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

So we have to make you pay your share now of the cost of running society. You don't have any choice.

It failed.

Personal responsibility doesn't work in health care. Rich people get care. Poor people die.

People who are poor don't have the same choices you do.

They're not buying 60" televisions. They're not buying lattes in Starbucks. They don't have relatives to fall back on for money. They can't buy insurance. They can barely afford transportation to work. Sometimes they can't afford transportation at all.

According to some handouts I got at a panel on Obamacare, the entire Obamacare premium for a family of 3 earning $78,000 would be $600 a month. So if they dropped Obamacare and got Major Medical instead, they wouldn't save $600 a month.

Major Medical is fine for people who are healthy and won't get sick. Any insurance is fine for people who are healthy and won't get sick.

The problem comes when people get sick. If you develop multiple sclerosis, your medical costs will go up enormously. You could easily spend $100,000 in the first year. You could be spending $500 and $1,000 on specialist visits.You could get a dozen MRI scans at $10,000 apiece. Your medical savings account won't cover it.

Doctors don't insist. Patients ask them which contraceptives are safest and most effective. They give their recommendations.

Except for the guys who shoot abortion doctors.

While condoms have useful purposes, they have a contraceptive failure rate of about 1% a year. A gynecologist at a medical school once told me that for women who absolutely must not get pregnant, she prescribes either the contraceptive loop or the hormone implants, both of which must be inserted by a doctor. Another reliable method is the pill, which must be prescribed by a doctor. The cheapest place to get this is usually a Planned Parenthood clinic. Otherwise it might cost $1-2,000

Throughout the South, politicians have been closing down Planned Parenthood clinics. Romney said that he will do anything he can to shut down Planned Parenthood. http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

They've also been trying to exclude contraceptives from health insurance under a religious exemption. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

I've also noticed that when I see a list of states with their incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, Mississippi and Alabama are usually at the top of the list.

The infant mortality and maternal mortality is pretty high in the U.S. in general and throughout the South in particular. Yes, Rolling Stone was correct.

This is what you're referring to.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02...
Health Care Horror Hooey
Paul Krugman
FEB. 23, 2014
(Right-wingers convinced Americans that farms are being broken up to pay "death tax" estate liabilities, but there is not one single example. Now the Republicans are creating Obamacare horror stories, which don't hold up upon fact checking. In the GOP response to the State of the Union address, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers claimed "Bette in Spokane" had lost her good insurance and was forced to pay $700 a month more. Local reporters found the real Betty, and found out [Bette Grenier had a catastrophic plan, and she refused to look on the ACA web site.] In Michigan, Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch Brothers, is running an ad about Julie Boonstra, who has leukemia, saying that her new policy will have unaffordable out-of-pocket costs. But Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post found that she will be saving more than she will be paying in out-of-pocket costs. [The Obamacare out-of-pocket maximum is $6,350. Her premiums were cut in half, from $1,100/mo to $571/mo.])
[T]he true losers from Obamacare generally aren’t very sympathetic. For the most part, they’re either very affluent people affected by the special taxes that help finance reform, or at least moderately well-off young men in very good health who can no longer buy cheap, minimalist plans. Neither group would play well in tear-jerker ads.

The best way to understand the ACA is that your maximum of (premiums + out of pocket) is ~$8,000 for an individual. So whatever crazy policy you gamble on, your worst case is $8,000/year.

Which is what happened to Brandon Boyer.

http://boingboing.net/2014/03/...
Humana screws Brandon Boyer for $100K worth of cancer bills - help him pay them
Cory Doctorow at 12:00 pm Fri, Mar 7, 2014

Our good pal Brandon "Offworld" Boyer has cancer. Lucky for Brandon, he signed up for medical insurance with Humana not long before he was diagnosed. Unlucky for him, Humana has decided unilaterally not to cover his cancer treatments and has stuck him with with a $100,000 bill.

That's one of those ideas that sounds good but doesn't work when you try them out in the real world. Most other developed countries have health care systems that pay 100% of costs (although non-American Slashdotters may be informative on that). Health insurance isn't car insurance.

The biggest problem is that once people have to pay for "routine" visits, they don't go on routine visits. Obviously you are one of those people who can afford to pay for a $200 doctor's visit out of pocket. Maybe half of Americans are in your category. The other half aren't. Doctors have no end of stories about people who didn't get routine care because they couldn't afford it, and wound up with preventable, fatal diseases. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

The other problem with "emergency" care is, "what is an emergency?" If I have to pay $100 for a doctor's visit myself, but my insurance pays for my $2,000 ER visit, I'm going to have a lot of emergencies. That actually was the problem in the Swiss health care system, which was mostly a catastrophic system which didn't kick in fully until you had passed a certain amount (It might have been $30,000). Once you reach $30,000, the insurance company has to pay for everything, 100%, so the doctors give them CAT scans, tests, specialist consultations, etc., and bill it all to the insurance company.

Think about it. Any policy is perfect for healthy younger folks who never need coverage. The only people who need health insurance are the ones who get sick. If you develop multiple sclerosis or lupus, you can live a much more normal life if you can afford to get a lot of health care. There are drugs that can save your life and keep you out of a wheelchair for $50,000 a year.

I knew a young, libertarian Republican who had severe psoriasis, which put him in the hospital once or twice a year. The drugs he was taking were damaging his liver and kidneys. There were new, more effective, safer drugs -- but they cost $100,000 a year. What did he do? Government handouts. His wife was a government employee, and he was covered on her policy.

Your main point is right. Co-payments are terrible health policy.

Actually, the most common example is people with asthma. If they use their controller medication, they won't get asthma attacks, but the controller medication can be expensive. There were health insurance plans that covered 100% of medication costs. Then they shifted to co-payments. Even with small co-payments, people stopped taking their controller medication. They got asthma attacks, and wound up in the hospital. One ER trip will cost as much as several years of controller medication. So the plans wound up paying more under co-payments as they did with 100% payments. Same with co-payments for blood pressure medication -- more heart attacks and strokes. If you want to look this up, to make sure I'm not repeating an urban myth, it was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine by Amal N. Trivedi, who published a few other studies like that. Also see the Rand Health Insurance Experiment on Wikipedia or elsewhere.

Here's what Krugman had to say. If you say you did the math, you might be right, but there are a lot of BS health care stories out there. The big benefit of Obamacare is that it limits your (pemium+copayments) to ~$8,000. One big weakness of Obamacare is that when you find an "affordable" plan, it might have a small pool of doctors, it might not have a doctor that you've been using, and it might not have an competent doctors at all. Single payer would have been better, but, as Uwe Reinhardt says, the American political system is too corrupt for that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02...
Health Care Horror Hooey
Paul Krugman
FEB. 23, 2014
(Right-wingers convinced Americans that farms are being broken up to pay "death tax" estate liabilities, but there is not one single example. Now the Republicans are creating Obamacare horror stories, which don't hold up upon fact checking. In the GOP response to the State of the Union address, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers claimed "Bette in Spokane" had lost her good insurance and was forced to pay $700 a month more. Local reporters found the real Betty, and found out [Bette Grenier had a catastrophic plan, and she refused to look on the ACA web site.] In Michigan, Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch Brothers, is running an ad about Julie Boonstra, who has leukemia, saying that her new policy will have unaffordable out-of-pocket costs. But Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post found that she will be saving more than she will be paying in out-of-pocket costs. [The Obamacare out-of-pocket maximum is $6,350. Her premiums were cut in half, from $1,100/mo to $571/mo.])
[T]he true losers from Obamacare generally aren’t very sympathetic. For the most part, they’re either very affluent people affected by the special taxes that help finance reform, or at least moderately well-off young men in very good health who can no longer buy cheap, minimalist plans. Neither group would play well in tear-jerker ads.