I have anecdotes as well. The year after it kicked in, my insurer sent me a check for the premiums they collected, but didn't spend on health care. This year my premiums didn't rise at all. The year before Obamacare, my rates rose by nearly $15 a month, which for a health plan that was only charging a bit over $100 a month, that was a huge increase.

Bottom line is that insurance rates have been increasing by an average of 12% for a long time, blaming Obamacare when it hasn't even finished coming into effect is just plain ignorant.

Also, it's less than 2 weeks before the insurance exchanges open up and a ton of options come on the market. Right now, I can't change my insurance due to multiple misdiagnoses that the doctors won't remove, but in two weeks I'll have something like 20 plans to choose from.

I'm sorry, but that's bullshit there. Again, it's profitable to screen people and the treatments themselves are very expensive. What's more, we have a tendency to keep treating people that are probably best just allowed to have their dignity. Most Americans don't want to be hooked up to a ton of machines when their time comes, but when it comes to what actually happens, they usually wind up hooked up to a ton of machines.

I'm not sure how your assertion disproves my assertion. Doctors in the US over test patients.

Depends which phone you're talking about and yes, you can get a decent phone for that kind of money without a contract. Paying for an OS that fixes what the carrier and Google should have gotten right in the first place isn't something that I view as reasonable.

Pretty much. I put it on my phone because it's free and awesome, I'm curious how they're going to make any money on this. My new phone is going to set me back $250 and they're then wanting to have some of my money for the OS? Or they'll want to do something with ads, which isn't going to be acceptable either. Or perhaps an alternate app shop that I won't use because it's going to be competing with Play.

Most of those treatments are available because it's more profitable to neglect preventative care and treat the chronic conditions that result from it. We do very well at treating strokes and heart disease at later stages because we allow for the conditions that are likely to lead to those disorders to crop up unchecked. And then spend a crapload of money treating something that could have been prevented.

We already know what the results will be, the care will improve, the costs will go down and if it doesn't work, the private insurers will be removed from the equation. That's basically what happened in the UK when they first tried to reform health care.

That's because most people that use the term "Obamacare" are doing it to disparage the President. I use the term because it's an accomplishment that the President should be proud of. It's just that until next month when people can start signing up, a lot of people view it as a failed initiative. Even though those plans don't start until the first of the year.

As soon as people start to actually get those plans, it's going to be impossible for the GOP to get them away from us. It's also harder to scare people about health related matters when they have access to affordable health care.

That's because you're crazy. But, thankfully you'll be able to get affordable coverage starting in a few months.

Honestly, when you look at the cost of health care in America compared with even the most expensive systems in the developed world, the costs are higher here and the outcomes are inferior.

In other words, it may cost more in the near term as preventative care becomes more accessible. But, fewer people using the ER for primary care and fewer bankruptcies caused by medical bills should start to bring the costs down fairly quickly. Then in a few decades the savings from preventative care should be apparent.

It's mostly people who watch Fox Noise and have no idea what it is that they're paying for when they go to the doctor's office that are afraid. All that charity care isn't being paid for by the government, it's being tacked on to the cost of insurance.

That's the thing, there's always going to be problems with the health care system, but when one system spends twice as much per capita as another, for worse results, only a die hard fascist would continue to support profits being made for inferior results.

That's how we wound up with President Bush. The vote wouldn't have been close enough for SCrOTUmS to steal from Gore had people not been voting for Nader.

The last 3rd party candidate to do that was Roosevelt. The only person in my lifetime to get anywhere near that was Ross Perot. And even he wasn't able to crack 20% of the popular vote.

In many cases the other guy is even worse than the incumbent. Granted this is a huge issue, but it's hardly the only issue. The same Libertarians that are usually standing up to this stuff are also the same Libertarians that are for abolishing various workers' rights and generally deregulating things.

That's your typical alternative.

Bottom line is that until the states take away the right of the parties to handle their own nominations and the right of the ruling party to draw the districting lines, this isn't likely to change. To date 48 out of 50 states still permit the ruling party to draw the districting lines. A top 2 primary combined with that tends to push the parties closer together to the point that they can actually talk.

Or just vote the GOP out of office as they're the ones that started this and they're the ones that refuse to compromise on anything. It's not like they're a viable party at this point anyways, they only have seats because of gerrymandering.

Fox News isn't a news organization, they're an entertainment channel. They regularly make up things to broadcast and broadcast them long past the point where everybody else realizes that they're not true. They were the last ones to stop claiming that Obamacare included death panels even though they could have simply read the entire act and found that there were never any death panels in there.

Hence the term Faux News, it's not real news, it's right wing propaganda from a company owned by a foreigner. That spends a lot of time spewing xenophobic trash.

Oh, good, that's what I'm planning to do next week after my CC billing date. Looks to be an awesome phone, I loved my Nexus One, but it's getting rather long in the tooth. Having 16gb of storage space and a bit larger screen is going to make my Plecco much nicer to use.

Plus, the wireless charging is something I missed from that back I had for my Razr. It's nice to just set the phone down and not have to worry about damaging the jack late at night.

Sprint refuses to allow any phones that don't have their logo to connect to their network, regardless of whether or not they use the right portion of the spectrum. It's why I canceled my contract with them for AT&T. I kind of regret doing it because the Sprint network around here is much better and AT&T is run by asshats.