well yea, it's a travesty to handle it through employment. I'm just trying to say why it is so difficult to change from that model.

Even if their employer drops them, they can transfer to the COBRA program and it will cost them similar premiums and deductibles as most employer plans. The ones who are truly on their own are the sick who got that way during a time when they didn't have insurance, and there are a lot of them.

My theory, in part, is that having medical insurance covered by benefits from your employer is a great advantage to those who are very sick and those who have a family. Essentially their health care is subsidized by a large number of single healthy coworkers. The family people still outnumber the single people though, in general, so the model stays alive by popular demand.

If medical insurance was exclusively an open market thing, then plans would come into existence that are geared towards single people, and it would be advantageous for them to band together in their health pool. They would win out over the current situation. Families and the very sickly would then have to pool with each other, and they would lose relative to their current situation.

and conservatives are all about reducing the debt and cutting entitlements, until it involves raising taxes or reducing funds for medicare.

  Any organization of people is hypocritical if you conglomerate the views of every participating individual into one mass.

Not having a facebook account could be just as risky for your privacy. Say one of your friends took a photo of you which you'd rather not have publicly broadcast say in a stripclub or whatever. He could put that photo on facebook, and you'd never be wise to it because you don't have a facebook account from which to view it. Then years down the road you're getting a divorce or something, and your wife's lawyer digs that photo up and finds evidence you cheated on her, so on.

but don't forget it isn't cut and dry that forcing helmets will reduce overall health costs. The point of TFA was if you force helmets, less people ride bikes, and maybe this causes otherwise greater obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.

Some might call what's left of the Taliban in Afghanistan a militia. Do you consider a 10 year struggle against them with no end in sight easy and effortless?

The whole reason for the corn subsidy is because of the mission of our agriculture department in the 1970's to create access to abundant, cheap food for the poor classes. Obviously its not healthy in the slightest, but it's hard to argue that they achieved their goal. Those below the poverty line do not contribute to the subsidy, and they get access to inexpensive, sorry tasting beef and HFCS based food products.

I'm not 100% sure about your statement on the sugar taxes. It may be that if you're right about them, then they contribute to the issue. But I really believe the corn subsidy is the real reason it is less expensive to use HFCS in America than real sugar.

I doubt verymuch that it is preference for bad meat, but rather a preference for cheap meat. with the corn subsidy, it is cheaper to raise cattle in confinement farms, rather than grass grazing. Remember, that the poor folks who buy the cheapest meat are not the ones paying for the majority of the corn subsidy.

I'm not sure how if this law applies in the event of a labor strike. But is this partially a response to the Verizon strike, where many employees who worked in their various NOCs were given massive overtime to compensate for the striking workers in the North East. I worked in the Cary, NC building, but I had just left the company before the strike occurred, so I don't know the specifics of how everyone got compensated for the overtime.

The world is not as Euro-centric as most of our history lessons. I doubt the mass 'migration' of millions of pacific islander will do any wonders for world peace.

hydrogen is much more reactive/combustible than methane. I'd argue that the risks (or costs associated with keeping it safe) would not be worth it.

Whoa whoa not likely, this would require them to actually ramp up production of fossil fuel in the face of lowering demand and increasing price. assuming we are making the assumption that the extraction equipment is powered by oil. it might take more oil to get at the oil in the ground, but the worldwide rate of oil production/consumption will not increase!

Well you could rebuild the dam the next day, but it would still take several years to complete the job and Las Vegas would be basically empty until that was done.

I would also argue that the only nuclear accident that has ever impacted someone who just happened to be in the vicinity was Chernobyl, which was a reactor that had no containment. There isn't a reactor in operation today that could just irradiate everyone around it instantaneously. There will be a warning and time for evacuation. I don't personally believe fukushima will lead to a measurable increase of cancer rate in those who left the evacuation zone, but we will only have a clue about that in perhaps 10-20 years.

You could build small hydroelectric dams that wouldn't flood anyone out, but I doubt you could build one to match the power generation of a nuclear reactor that wouldn't carry that risk. People often live next to rivers.

Meanwhile in the U.S. the EPA must be abolished if we want jobs again. Maybe so if we want more oncologists.

What's the point of being able to 'go there' if the damage has been done. That whole region is artificially modified to support mass habitation, and if the Dam fails it is no different than if the cooling processes in a nuclear reactor fail. Mass evacuation, some death, and a region that will not be particularly useful to us for a long time. The numbers are a case by case basis depending on which nuclear reactor fails, but I think you'd have a hard time matching the numbers generated by a failure of Hoover dam as laid out by the article you referenced.

The hoover dam is one sturdy piece of construction, but failures of hydroelectric dams are relatively common. Many of them kill directly and one has killed several million in a single sweep. It is just as reasonable to say we cannot engineer hydroelectric dams to the necessary level of safety either.

The study wasn't even peer-reviewed and was done for an organization who's stated goal was eliminating the risks of nuclear power. The NY Times ran an article referencing the same study, and then had to append a revision because of how biased it was.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/business/global/27iht-renuke.html?_r=3