And I don't believe that. The rates in question are common knowledge. There are only three insurance providers allowed by the government to operate in our state. We went with the LEAST expensive option (CareFirst) - the other two providers were 15% and 32% more expensive, respectively, on the monthly rates, and about the same on the huge deductibles. The problem isn't that you don't believe it, it's that you're trying to wish it away.

And even as you say you don't believe it, you run down a list of things that would contribute to exactly what I described. The only reason you're not seeing this for millions and millions more people is because the employer mandate was illegally pushed back by Obama until after tomorrow's election. When that kicks in - a year later than it the law he signed said it must - there will a lot more people for you to not believe, not just us millions of self employed and small business types.

What's irrational about it? Obama and Pelosi stood there, time after time, and sold their new law by knowingly and deliberately lying about some of its key features. Lying, over and over again. Pelosi assured us we'd need to pass it to see what was in it, and echoed Obama in promising we'd be able to keep our insurance (a lie) and our doctor (another one).

And drug addicts? It's simple: neither my wife nor I are. If we were to become such, our previous insurance would have provided services along those lines, but we'd have had to include those expenses in our (much lower than now) deductible. Likewise, in the laws-of-physics-make-it-impossible scenario of us suddenly getting pregnant. Our previous insurance would have also helped there, but our deductible would have still been involved.

In both these cases, the new law mandates that the insurer provides these services (typically, $20,000+ for a normal birth, for example) without that being subject to the deductible. Because they have to pay all of the costs of their customers' decision to have a baby, the insurers do simple math and raise the rates that fund those payments. We have fancy new maternity coverage we don't need, but for which we are certainly paying a lot more because of the Affordable act. You say you "don't believe" this. Which simply can't be the case, because these are simple facts, right in front of you. Your condescending dismissal is pretty transparent.

Your fake sense of smell is about as honest as your fake tutt-tutting about the truth. I'm not a martyr, I'm just one of the very deliberate new beasts of burden baked right into the law on purpose as it seeks to dole out new entitlements to a demographic that typically votes for the party that unilaterally rammed the law through. Gee, what a surprise.

Right, and if I get a disease my insurance covers it, after we pay our $12,000 deductible. Last year, it would have been after we paid a $2,500 deductible. But if we get another expensive condition (pregnancy), no need to worry! It's all covered. Just ... pay that new $800/month rate, instead of the $250 you were paying, right?

That's exactly why people on a modest fixed retirement income become members of groups like AARP, or why even bubbas in Appalachia with hardly any cash see fit to become members of the NRA, or why no-job-having eco-activists join the Sierra Club, etc. To pool their voices, and express themselves with like minded people - and to also do that on matters that matter to them, in front of the right legislators and executive branch people.

And ... deals? Of COURSE people make deals. "We have a factory to build. We want to build it where it makes the most sense, and that includes a country and a state and a county and a city where the regulatory atmosphere, the tax climate, and the prospects for other growth are attractive for the long term. We think you should focus on the following legislative priorities, or we'll go somewhere that has a legislator who sees things the same way we do." Are you suggesting that people should completely ignore how the decisions made by their elected officials impact their prosperity?

Or, the province of normal people like you and me who use all of this glorious new technology to assemble - virtually or traditionally - and be every bit as impactful on the political discourse as some rich guy or raving revolutionary. You may not like them, but look to the NRA as an example. They have a clear agenda, and millions of every-man members whose very modest dues pile up to give them the same sort of horsepower as a guy like Soros, at least within the topic on which they're focused.

Why? You don't think you should be able to help a candidate you like get his message out?

Or put it another way. Let's say a politician is running for office, and he promises that high no his list is to do something to make whatever it is that YOU do or like miserable for you. Say, looking to ban photography in city parks, or tell people they can no long fly their RC models like they've been doing for decades, anywhere in your city or state. Or that he's going to seek to institute some high new tax that singles out your profession. Whatever.

Do you really think that you should be prevented from communicating about that? Or do you think that you SHOULD be able to do something like run an ad in the local newspaper that brings attention to what you see as a dangerous campaign, but you think you should get the use of that newspaper's printing presses and employees for free? Or that your fellow taxpayers should write a check for you so you could say your mind? Would they have to do that every day, if that's how you want to do it? Every hour? Should we scrap the first amendment, and have the government prevent you from speaking your mind on something that's very important to you? Or would you have the government only prevent you from doing so if you have to pay for some paper to use in communicating, or pay to host a web site where you say it?

How is it "not right" to put your own resources into communicating a message you want people to hear? How is it not right to seek out some time with your elected representative to explain what you think, even if the only time the both of you have to do that is over breakfast before his legislative day is started?

Be specific.

Bribery? Be specific. Every last dollar contributed to campaigns is a matter of public record. Unless you're talking about stuff like that Democrat congressman caught with $90k of cash in his freezer as he got arrested for obvious political racketeering, or Chicago-type blatant pocket-stuffing. When a lobbyist sits down for dinner with a congressman or a senator, that's on the books, right down to what the steak cost. What are you referring to, specifically?

More likely Silicon Valley is tired to death of the grotesque regulator over-reach, a non-competitive business tax environment, endless waffling and lies about immigration reform, a disaster of a health care package, and the portrayal of the government as being completely feckless when it comes to international relations and the global economy. There's plenty not to like about some Republicans and the politicians they raise up ... but there's a LOT not to like about the Democrats if the current administration is its manifestation, as it relates to what it means to try to start up and run fast-moving, high-tech businesses in the US. Intellectual property issues are on the radar, but it's much, much bigger than that. The economy is being help back by sheer administrative clumsiness and knuckleheaded nanny-state ambitions. And that's holding back jobs, economic growth, and the sort of climate that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs crave.

It's not about the money, though. Democrats are spending MORE money than Republicans in trying to communicate their message, and they're still losing ground. It's about the entire Democrat party carrying around the stink left on it by a spectacularly incompetent administration - one that the party was supporting in a nearly religious way in order to get re-elected just a while ago. It's buyer's remorse, big time. And since the rest of the party can't bring themselves to say they don't support the administration's policies and world view (although some won't even admit they voted for the guy!), they're left by appearances tacitly endorsing the whole mess, and wearing the consequences as voters show their disgust.

Absolutely! Because if 10,000 people all have the same thing on their minds, and want to present their case to a legislator in the interests of getting their issue some attention in the House or the Senate, then it makes much more sense for all 10,000 of them to travel to DC and attempt to get some face time with the same one politician (say, the chairperson of whatever committee might impact the way legislation surrounding the topic in question is handled). Yes, that's FAR more efficient than those same 10,000 people pooling a much smaller share of each of their resources and time, and sending a single person to have a single sit-down with that same legislator. We certainly wouldn't want to ask someone who already knows everyone involved, and who understands how the legislature works, to choose the best time and circumstance and context in which to bring up something important. No, that's far too sensible - it's much better if we make it AGAINST THE LAW for people to exercise the first amendment rights to assemble and talk to their government.

Asking one person to talk to your representative on behalf of a bunch of you IS NOT CIRCUMVENTING DEMOCRACY. It's using your damn head.

How does employing a lobbyist to efficiently do what 10,000 of you would do separately equate to "buying" legislation any more than does 10,000 of you individually doing exactly the same thing? Are you suggesting that 10,000 of you shouldn't be allowed to talk to your representatives, or show support for their campaigns, or saying out loud (online, in a newspaper, or a media ad) that you think a given referendum, law, or politician is doing something wrong? Isn't that exactly the point of democracy? Or are you suggesting that campaigns and political expression should be conducted entirely with taxpayer dollars, no matter who the candidate is or how moonbat crazy they are? Personally, I'd like to choose whether and to whom my financial support goes to, when it comes to campaigns. You equate supporting campaigns with buying legislation, but propose no alternative. The only other options are to either force media companies to provide their services for free (government compulsion to support people who you may not actually support) to any old single-topic obsessive who wants to grind some political axe ("911 Truthers For Mars Exploration By Separated Twins!"), or to tell people they're not allowed to spend money to communicate about their politics - something the first amendment specifically protects from people like you, which is a good thing.

This! Skin pigment and chromosonal quota perfection in every walk of life is so much more important than any other thing that might make someone choose something else to do that we should force people to study things in which they're not interested. Because that way, we can be sure that they'll be passionate about hating it even more, so that when they apply for that quota-mandated position, we know they'll be miserable SOBs to work with, and productivity will be sure to suffer, for which we'll be sure to blame Evil Corporations.

Jesse Jackson is a hypocritical, lying fool. His agenda (which is to extort money from public and private institutions so that he and his entourage can spend their time well compensated for doing nothing but whining) is utterly transparent. But it plugs right into the Nanny State world view, which requires professional quota referees for every last thing, including the size of your drink cup and the precise tone of the skin of the programmer in the cube next to you.

Jackson is complaining that Amazon's stats aren't precise enough, but I notice he's not calling for stats about the measured skills and academic records of the couldn't-get-hired-there folks he thinks should be qualified strictly on cosmetic grounds. If he thinks that the members of a particular racial group aren't landing enough jobs at Amazon, he should be turning to that group and lecturing them about developing the critical thinking, communication, technical, entrepreneurial, scientific, and related skills that make someone a shoe-in for such jobs. ALL of that starts at home, and is pretty well viable or terminally broken by the time a kid is half way through elementary school. And THAT is all about the culture out of which that kid emerges. About which Jackson should be doing some serious introspection, if he could stand to look at himself in the mirror. He not only deliberately confuses race with culture, but he deliberately confuses cause and effect - all so that he can thunder on about it, threaten boycotts, and receive grant money from his extortion victims. This is just another round of his racketeering outfit doing what it does.

Excellent!

So, I should only pay part of my government regulated insurance premium, then, since you say that the actual dollar amount is incorrect?

Before the law kicked in, we paid about $250/month, and had a $2,500 deductible. Along comes Obamacare, and our premium (which now requires us to buy things like no-deductible comprehensive child-bearing services despite no longer young enough to even have kids, and comprehensive no-deductible drug treatment coverage for addictions we don't have) have risen to over $800/month, and our deductible is now $12,000/year. So if we have a broken bone in the family, or something else that adds up noticeably, we've gone from our health care costs each year being $5,500 to our healthcare costs being $21,600. Yeah, thanks Obama, Pelosi, and Reid for "bending" that cost. Thanks a lot. And our insurance regulating body in our state tells us that we should expect those premiums, because of the higher costs of coverage and the low participation of healthy people, to go up by 48% next year. So our monthly premium will be up to nearly $1,200. Yeah, that law's definitely got some people bending alright. What's a mystery is why you're such a fan. Has to be because you're on the receiving end of the subsidy equation, and are one of the extra people I'm now paying for.

And the only reason you're not hearing millions of more people screaming about this is because Obama illegally and unilaterally broke his own law, without involving the legislature, and altered the required dates so that people on employer-provided plans won't see exactly the same sort of giant increases in their rates and deductibles until after the mid-term election. A totally craven, partisan bit of manipulation designed to keep people like you whistling past the graveyard through the elections. Aren't you just a little bit embarrassed to be so easily manipulated? Or are you a party shill or some such, and already know all of this?

No, what they want is to not be the chumps that cripple their own economy for NO IMPACT on the climate while populations several times their size and polluting more every minute just carry on as usual.

They ONLY thing that makes healthy food, high-tech medicine, clean cities, fancy low-emission hybrids and electrics, and everything else not-like-a-century-ago is a robust economy. If you cannot understand the basic plumbing of civilization, please do not vote on Tuesday.

FWIW, our state has you in for a renewal and fresh paperwork every four years. At which time you're handed what amounts to a blank check for voter registration. Nothing during that process (completing the voter registration form) establishes what you say about your citizenship. In fact you can be at the MVA getting your driver's license, where your citizenship status IS addressed, and at the same time, hand in a voter registration that is 100% at odds with what you say about your license, and nobody can or will reconcile those two things, ever.

Of course that's what it says. If you want to get fussy about citations, I think the burden's on you to show where they make any sort of viable recommendation that will actually make a difference that doesn't include harming western economies while leaving China and India totally off the hook as they make the biggest growing mess.

Yes, they are. The businesses who sell them things are keenly aware of what regular people want and are willing to pay for. Regular people don't want to pay $15 for a gallon of gas, have their taxes hugely increased, have their job go away, have their food become wildly more expensive, and have the economy crippled so they can be seen Doing The Right Thing in a country of 300 million people, while billions of people doing a whole lot of last-century-style polluting don't do anything along the same lines, thus making the economic wreckage even worse.

Yes. I want to manipulate the process into the perfectly rational form in which it's used all around the world: one citizen, one vote.