GeorgiaDon

Would you believe he is my representative? He has my vote next election. I know you aren't, but you should be ashamed of the way you celebrate this kind of ignorance. Wearing ignorance on your sleeve is the new badge of honor for some. The intelligence of man is foolishness to God.Let's stipulate, just for purposes of this discussion, that God created humans in their present form, with (in at least some individuals) both curiosity about the world and the intelligence to figure out how things work (physics, chemistry, biology, geology etc). Would you say that these attributes (curiosity and intelligence) are a blessing or a curse? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I suggest you sell all your stocks and bonds, and invest in Beanie Babies. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Andy posts here too.More than one Andy. Does that mean they are all just different manifestations of the same Andy? Or should I pick one, believe that is the true Andy, and all the others are mythical? Should I hate people who respond to posts from the "wrong" Andy? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Would you believe he is my representative? He has my vote next election. Which is precisely why the Republican party is aligned with religion. It makes it easy for them to get votes from the illiterate. A strategy developed during the Reagan era, which is one of the reasons the US has been consistently been going downhill since then. Paul Broun, MD is a scientist. WOW!Paul Broun is no scientist. Being a MD does not make one a scientist, any more than auto mechanics are engineers. MDs are technicians; the ones who also are researchers may be scientists, depending on the field of research. Paul Broun is the antithesis of a scientist, as he does not believe in the scientific method and, further, he believes that objective scientific inquiry will inevitably lead one to hell. He is also my representative (I guess that makes us sort of neighbors). Although he ran unopposed in the last election, I cast a write-in vote for "Charles Darwin". I guess you and I cancel each other out in the vote department. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Sounds like a pretty amazing guy. We should all have such zest for life. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Are dropzones not run for profit? Does that mean the DZO doesn't care about safety? Your position that profit and medicine are antagonistic by nature is absurd. Businesses are not charities. If they do not make a profit, then who will pay for the research, development, and production of drugs and vaccines? If you think that some white knight with bottomlessly deep pockets will pony up the costs without expectation of reimbursement, you are living in la-la land. Drug companies cannot sell anything without registration from the FDA. This is necessary to ensure some independent evaluation of safety and efficacy. The process was developed in response to past experiences, when (in the absence of regulatory oversight) people were sometimes harmed, or at least deceived, when they bought untested remedies. The standard of proof of safety and efficacy that the FDA requires is very expensive. Satisfying the regulatory burden for a new drug costs in excess of $500 million, and a decade or more, to conduct cell culture assays, animal trials, small scale human clinical trials, and finally large scale clinical trials. Costs to bring a new vaccine to market approach $1 billion (with a "b") dollars. Of course "safe" does not mean "never has any adverse reactions in anybody, ever". People are highly complex, biologically, and vary in their genetics, state of health, and disease history. No clinical trial is likely to uncover side effects that occur in 1 in a million patients. More frequent side effects are noted on the label, and ideally your doctor will discuss these with you when she prescribes the drug. If your expectation is that drug companies will just eat $500,000,000 to $1,000,000,000 in development costs to provide you with drugs and vaccines, you are not living in the real world. If your perspective is that a drug or vaccine should not be sold if it produces a side effect in one person, even if it cures or prevents disease in a million others, then you should not be using any modern technology (such as airplanes to skydive) as everything carries some level of risk. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Sure, before these evil drug companies came along, and all these evil medical researchers and doctors who just want to control and exploit us, people lived to be hundreds of years old. Just look at the Book of Genesis, I guess. Or, you might look at sources such as [url"http://mappinghistory.uoregon.edu/english/US/US39-01.html"[this][/url] (amongst many others) to see what has happened to life expectancy. You may be surprised to learn that in the US at the beginning of the 20th century the average life expectancy at birth was just 47 years. By 1930, that rose to 59 years. That increase was not due to antibiotics, as the first of the antibiotics, penicillin, did not become available to be prescribed until after WW2. What do you imagine led to that increase in life expectancy? Today you can reasonably expect to live to your late 70s or beyond. Life expectancy has almost doubled in 100 years. If you think the drug companies are deceptive villains who peddle snake oil under the cover of the FDA and NIH, to what do you ascribe the increase in life expectancy? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Eisenhower and GHWB too. RINOs!I wonder how far back we would have to go to find a president who would be politically palatable to Rush and those of his ilk? I'm thinking the last one might have been Calvin Coolidge, president from 1924-1928. From his bio here: "As President, Coolidge demonstrated his determination to preserve the old moral and economic precepts amid the material prosperity which many Americans were enjoying. He refused to use Federal economic power to check the growing boom or to ameliorate the depressed condition of agriculture and certain industries. His first message to Congress in December 1923 called for isolation in foreign policy, and for tax cuts, economy, and limited aid to farmers." and "The political genius of President Coolidge, Walter Lippmann pointed out in 1926, was his talent for effectively doing nothing: "This active inactivity suits the mood and certain of the needs of the country admirably. It suits all the business interests which want to be let alone.... And it suits all those who have become convinced that government in this country has become dangerously complicated and top-heavy...." Of course, his term was followed almost immediately by the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, which was arguably made more likely to happen and worse when it did happen by Coolidge's policies. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Is it assinine to force a 22 year old skydiver to spend a lot of money on a reserve parachute? Containers could be a lot simpler, cheaper, and smaller (=cooler) if they didn't have to make room for a second parachute. You can buy a lot of jumps for the cost of a reserve. Shouldn't jumpers be able to make a choice for themselves? If they are convinced that they will never make a mistake, always pack perfectly and deploy from a perfect body position, who is the FAA to force them to buy a reserve they think they will probably never use? Maybe the cost calculus would be different if you could not just declare bankruptcy and walk away from your debts, sticking the rest of us with the bill. Perhaps your 22-year-old invincible would look at things differently if they were assured that they would have to pay the full bill, every penny, should they get sick/injured and chose not to be insured. Even if it meant that they had to use 80% of their income for the rest of their lives to do so. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I was unaware that Obama was president in 2003. If, on the other hand, he was a private citizen who held the opinion that the US system was doing a poor job, well he was far from alone in that opinion. Perhaps you disapprove of private citizens being allowed to voice their opinion? I experienced the Canadian health care system in Canada (Ontario and BC) for the first 39 years of my life, as a single person and as a parent of young children. Since then I have experienced the US system from the perspective of the parent buying family coverage on a very limited income, as well as from the perspective of a member of what is considered a very good group plan. I never had any problems with timely access to medical care in Canada. I could always get a same-day appointment, even on a Saturday, when I or my kids were sick. On the other hand, when I belonged to a HMO in Arizona I invariably had to fight to get an appointment, and always had to wait days to get to see my primary care doctor. On one occasion my wife broke her ankle, and the HMO would not approve even an X-ray until our primary care doctor returned from his vacation in 10 days. I took her to the hospital anyway, the x-ray confirmed the fracture, and the bone was set correctly and casted. Had I waited the 10 days the bone would have started to heal incorrectly, and would have had to be rebroken, trimmed to remove the new growth, then set and immobilized, a much more invasive process that would have risked permanent injury. I then had to fight with the HMO for almost a year to have them cover the treatment. My next door neighbor, a carpenter, had coverage under a different HMO. He cut his hand and nicked a tendon. Repair immediately would have involved stitching the tendon and the cut. He could not get an appointment for several days, and in the meantime the tendon tore the rest of the way through. What should have been a simple process turned into a major injury that required cutting open his hand to find the ends of the tendon, surgery to repair the tendon, and three months unpaid off work for the injury to heal. My experience is that as a full-time student with two kids and a pretty minimal family income, my access to health care in Canada was every bit as good as my present access to US health care as the beneficiary of a group plan heavily subsidized by my employer. What's up with the quotation marks? Are you disputing that Kallend is indeed an engineering professor? On what basis do you question that? Your new avatar does fit your "personality" better. Though I thought the mug shot was pretty appropriate too. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Regulator clearly copied-and-pasted from some article in his post at the start of the thread. The 1993 quote is in there. The article Regulator linked is not the article he copied in his post. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

On what basis do you say this? What is your training as a clinician or immunologist? Or are you just "going with your gut" (that whole truthiness thing)? You can be exposed to hepatitis in a number of ways. Sure, sex is a common one and one hopes that a baby would not be exposed that way. But if that baby is later in an accident and needs a blood transfusion, it's too late then to vaccinate and wait for a decent antibody titer to develop before giving the transfusion. Anyway, if the clinical and epidemiological evidence indicates no increased risk giving the vaccine early, then what is the advantage of waiting? Wouldn't that be kind of awkward: "Well Suzie, you're starting to develop physically and boys are getting interested in you, so maybe it's time to get those shots before you start fucking?" The drug company gets paid the same if the patient is 6 months or 16 years. What do you mean by "farce"? That it doesn't work? And the "inventor" (who is that? Many people worked on that vaccine) admits it? So the clinical trials were faked, and the FDA played along, just so a drug company could make money selling a product they knew did not work? Perhaps you can provide some links or evidence to back up such a claim. Clinical trials are overseen by the FDA and in most cases the NIH. Are you saying they are all in cahoots to deceive the public? Do you use any dietary supplements? Take megavitamins? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I'll concede it's a complicated issue. When my daughter got pregnant in high school, we (as a family) never entertained the possibility of abortion, as there was no threat to her health. With a lot of family support my daughter finished high school on time, and later graduated from University. We have a wonderful granddaughter, who we would not trade for the world. But, that was the right course of action for us. I would not feel right at all insisting that that would be right for someone else. I am also wary of insisting that tax dollars never be used for any purpose that some group of people find objectionable. Jehova's Witnesses' forbid blood transfusions and organ transplants. Scientologists object to psychiatry, and insist that diet and exercise, not antibiotics, is the solution to every disease. If medicare/medicaid could not cover any procedure that someone, somewhere, finds objectionable, then they would cover nothing at all. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Jehova's Witnesses' believe the exact same thing about blood transfusions. You want to make the choice for women, but you don't want Jehova's Witnesses' to make the choice about whether or not to receive a life-saving transfusion for you. Funny how that works. Out of curiosity, when was the last time you, personally, had to decide whether or not to have an abortion? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Jehovah's Witnesses' have a well-known prohibition against receiving blood transfusions, even if it means they will die. Their prohibition is based on their view of the sacredness of life. From Wikipedia: " Blood represents life[13] and is sacred to God.[14][15] After it has been removed from a creature, the only use of blood that God has authorized is for the atonement of sins.[16] When a Christian abstains from blood, they are in effect expressing faith that only the shed blood of Jesus Christ can truly redeem them and save their life.[14] Blood must not be eaten or transfused,[10][17] even in the case of a medical emergency.[18]" So Rush, how would you feel about blood transfusions being prohibited by law, even if that means you would be allowed to die of an easily treated injury, because one segment of society believes blood is sacred? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I've never understood this argument. Are you saying that any temperature extreme that has ever existed at any point in the history of the planet would be "normal" today and acceptable to you? Perhaps you should check out the climate at the end of the Permian, when a severe greenhouse event (triggered by extensive volcanic eruptions through massive coal deposits in Siberia) almost wiped out multicellular life. Besides soaring temperatures, oxygen levels fell so that sea-level oxygen partial pressure was equivalent to what exists at 15,000 feet today (note that you need to provide bottled oxygen at that altitude). The absence of any significant latitudinal gradient in temperature (hot everywhere) shut down oceanic circulation, an as a result the deep ocean became anoxic. The only thing that could live in the ocean deeper than a couple of hundred feet was blue-green algae, and as a result the ocean burped SO2 for a couple of million years. SO2 is a great greenhouse gas itself, and also displaced oxygen from the atmosphere. The result was the extinction of >95% of the marine species, and >90% of known terrestrial species also went extinct. It took over 15 million years for biodiversity to recover to the level it was at just before the extinction event. Is that your standard of how bad things have to get before we should start to get a little concerned? Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

One would like to think that would be the case, but there have been several Florida cases where people have provoked a conflict, resorted to lethal force when things went wrong, and have then successfully invoked a SYG defense. People have always had the right to use lethal force if they are attacked and have no reasonable way to get away. All that matters under SYG is, did the person who resorted to lethal force actually believe their life was in danger at the time they pulled the trigger (or knife or whatever)? How you got into that situation in the first place is not legally relevant, unless you were in the process of committing a crime. Unfortunately, it also seems that the law has encouraged some belligerent bullies to throw their weight around, believing (sometimes correctly, sometimes not) that if things went to hell they could hide behind SYG. I rather suspect the case this thread is about is one of those. Certainly someone with the accused's law enforcement background would have been well aware of SYG. It's beyond me to understand why anyone would be bothered by someone texting during the previews. It's not like they are talking or making noise. I'm inclined to speculate that the killer was just pissed off that someone was "breaking the rules" (no texting in the theater), yet they were quite willing to excuse themselves from "the rules" (no guns in the theater). In other words, a belligerent bully. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I regularly encounter students who cannot not answer their phone, even when they have to interrupt a conversation with a real person to do so. The person right in front of them is always the one who gets "put on hold". If a student does that to me, "office hours" are over until they learn some manners. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I think this captures things pretty well. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Hmmm. Kelpdiver wrote: "if that colonoscopy results in someone not getting terminal cancer that costs hundreds of thousands to not cure, then that soup may end up being free after all. Preventative medicine generally has a high ROI, not to mention keeping the patients in better health, which is the point of health care in the first place." To which you responded: "That's a good short term picture. But what if that person ends up with Alzheimers in 10 years and now costs more? It sucks to say this, but aren't costs merely being defrayed? Everybody eventually dies of some incurable condition. " Your words. Nothing there to indicate that you're channeling the intentions of the authors of the ACA. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that your words reflect your opinion, especially considering your often stated opposition to the notion that poor people should have access to health care, even in life-threatening situations (repeal EMTALA, etc). Anyway, I disagree with your whole thesis about the ACA (not surprisingly). In an environment where escalating costs ensure that fewer and fewer people can afford access to health care, it's not unreasonable to postulate that reducing costs is a necessary condition to increasing the number of people who can get care when they need it. It seems pretty twisted (to me) to argue that making access to health care affordable to more people is somehow the same as not valuing human life. I would not say that the ACA is perfect, by any means, but it takes a considerable feat of "logic" to argue that the intent of the law is to make people die sooner by making health care less accessible. I would also point out that people are not cars. Using such an example only reinforces the impression that you advocate valuing people as objects to be discarded when they are no longer cost effective. I doubt you would apply such logic to yourself or your loved ones. In fact, I doubt you'd apply it to anyone in the real world (as opposed to these hypothetical cyberdebates). Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I do hope you picked out the cigarette butts first. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

It would be hyperbole to describe it as a "vast right-wing conspiracy", but I suggest that cultural values play some role. In other economically developed countries, access to health care is considered to be a basic human right. Accordingly, they devote significant public resources to ensuring access for everybody. The US is pretty much alone in regarding timely* health care access as a commodity, similar to buying a wide-screen TV. (*In the US we do require hospitals to provide emergency care for life-threatening conditions, but that requires indigent people to delay treatment until a lot of damage has been done.) The fact that every medical procedure costs several times what the same procedure costs elsewhere ensures an almost insurmountable barrier for most people to pay out of pocket. Disparities in income, access to education, quality of education, etc are all larger in the US than elsewhere. In a general sense, I suggest that other countries invest heavily in education and access to health care, regarding these as basic human rights, and they spend much less on the military. In the US, we prefer to spend resources on the military, and regard health care and (to some extent) education as commodities to be sold to the highest bidder. We could also discuss the role of the US prisonocracy in fostering certain very harmful social trends (such as absence of fathers) and the associated perpetuation of poverty in certain segments of society. To the extent that these US policies reflect right-wing policies, I suggest there is a role for right-wing values in explaining the disparity in life spans. It's not a "conspiracy", just a "by-product". Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Isn't that an argument to never treat anybody for anything? It's also predicated on the assumption that the only value people have is economic. We'd have a pretty bleak world if it ran on your values. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

Can you point me to the law that imposes this requirement? Your comment prompted me to do some reading, and I learned that the rules are complicated, but I found nothing that forbids charity work. Here is one especially interesting article. Certainly, a doctor cannot routinely just waive the co-pay for patients on Medicare, and still bill Medicare for their share of the payment, as in that case Medicare would end of picking up 100% of the tab (even though the tab is reduced by the amount of the copay). Most or all private insurers have the same rule. Also doctors cannot legally underbill, charging for a simpler (and cheaper) procedure when they actually performed a more complicated one. In part, this is because it is fraud to misrepresent the services being charged for, even if the intentions are noble. More seriously, Medicare and insurance companies track treatments and outcomes for medical conditions, so as to establish best practices standards and guide future decisions about what treatments are appropriate. If a doctor has a practice with a lot of indigent patients, and routinely bills for simple procedures but performs more complicated ones, they can end up skewing the statistics to make it look as though the simple procedures are an effective treatment. Down the road, insurers will adjust their policies so they will only pay for the simple procedures, not the more complicated ones that were actually performed, and all doctors will be bound by those rules. Patients will only be able to have the simple procedure covered, and that procedure will not be adequate to cure their problem, as it would not be the treatment that was actually done for the patients who had a good outcome. It is critically important that accurate records of treatments and outcomes be maintained, as that is what is used to guide future practice. All that being said, there is a procedure within Medicare/Medicaid for doctors to waive part or all of their fee, but that must be done on a case by case basis, not as a matter of routine, and there is paperwork that must be submitted in each instance to justify the decision. No doubt this is a PITA, and is a disincentive to doing this frequently, but the process does exist if the doctor feels it is necessary. There are hospitals that do charity work, some as a matter of routine (St. Jude's for example) and many on a case by case basis. It's hard for me to believe that none of these hospitals or doctors have any Medicare or Medicaid patients. Again, I'd be grateful if you can point me to the law, or to a good link explaining the law, that forbids doctors from performing charity work if their practice includes any Medicare patients. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

I'm glad that you were able to return to the military and have a good experience. I suppose you're also lucky to be rid of wife #1 without children or other long-term issues. Nevertheless, this is an example of some of the most damaging behavior possible within the military. Sometimes people in command have to order subordinates to perform duties that could result in their death. What could be more damaging to morale than the suspicion that you are being given orders to get you out of the way, so the senior officer can have a shot at your wife? I can't imaging anything more corrupting to the trust that has to exist for the military to be able to function. It's pretty shocking that higher-ups would be so shortsighted as to let that kind of thing go. Everyone who looked the other way should have been hung by their testicles. Don _____________________________________ Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996) “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)