TomAiello

Hilarious video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRRy-QlQyUw -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I disagree. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. Or perhaps you're right, and it's not the threat of force, but rather it's actual exercise. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

If the money belongs to the government, why do you sign an employment contract that states it is yours? Why do you get a job where the employer says you'll get 80k, for example rather than saying "you'll get 40k, and we'll send the government another 40k" or something like that? There's definitely a fiction that we are entitled to the fruit of our own labor. In fact we are all the property of the government, and, just as it owns us, it owns our labor. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

From only the article, it would appear that the patients are victims of insufficient regulation of non-profit entities in that state. But the for-profit system across town has sufficient regulation? -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Tax money is not your money. It is our money (i.e. it belongs to the collective population of the nation, state, and/or city). Really? So, who's paycheck DID the taxes I pay come out of, then? You misunderstand the realities, Comrade. The entire paycheck belongs to the State. The State has graciously allowed you to use part of it, for the time being. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Ok, here is the full article. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Apologies. I'm signed in, so I get the full article at that link. Let me see if I can find the whole thing somewhere else. It's not so much that I'm judging all non-profits. It's that I'm pointing out that non-profit is not always a better option. Plus, this is one non-profit that has been specifically held up by the President as an example of what he'd like to see. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

No. There are lots of things I have no right to do, even if my life (or my child's life) is in the balance. If you offered to pay for the procedure if I killed someone else's child, would it be right for me to do that? What if I had the opportunity to embezzle the money to pay for the procedure? Would that be justified because my need was so dire? What if the only way to save my child's life was to enslave another human being and force them to work my fields, planting cotton, that I could sell to pay for the procedure? Would that make it ok for me to enslave someone? On the one side is thousands of lives. On the other side is just one life. You really think those are equal? It's easy to say "you have a right" to something. It's harder to face the reality that you (or we) simply cannot afford everything. We have to make hard decisions sometimes, and we can't always have everything we want. Simply saying "I'll take both" is a cop out. You've only got the resources for one or the other--which do you choose? -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Are there really gradations of douchebaggery? Sure there are. The one guy didn't take any taxpayer money by his deception. The other guy not only spends billions of taxpayer dollars, but he sends the taxpayers themselves (and their children) off to die. We'll say the first guy is a simple "douchebag" and the second is a "major douchebag." -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Curious how you feel about the non-profit profiled here? The one who charges five times as much as the for profit hospital across town, and maintains a venture capital fund, while paying it's executives 7 figure salaries? Believe it or not, this is one of the systems that President Obama has held up as a model for the future of healthcare in this country. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Easy enough to motivate them. Just throw them in prison if they refuse to work. It did real well for Comrade Stalin. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Is it right that someone should starve, just because they can't pay for food? Why not address simple (and inexpensive) hunger first, before moving up to $200,000 medical procedures? How many starving children could you have fed for that $200,000? How greedy are you to take the food out of their mouths for your bone marrow transplant? Don't the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? What if you were in the position of needing an expensive procedure to save your life and your health care provider said "Sorry, not covered." Would you be making the same argument? Nope. I'd be taking out a line of credit on my home or my future earnings. Or, if I thought that wasn't worth the expense that I'd saddle my children with (if I was older, for example), I'd be having some good parties and visiting all my friends and family. Care to respond to the question I asked? Why is your bone marrow transplant more important than pulling thousands of children out of hunger? -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Here's an idea that's cheaper than any of the current plans, ready to go much sooner, and provides a quality of care rated very highly by the current participants. Open the federal employees health plan (the one that the Obamas have, as well as most of the members of Congress) to open enrollment for anyone. Have the federal government pay the premiums for any person making less than $20,000 per year, or household earning less than $50,000 per year. It's cheaper, it's faster, and it offers a known high quality program. What do you think? -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Isn't the healthcare "reform" now underway is being mostly formed by the lobbying of insurance companies?

So, basically that he sold himself to the voters as one thing, when in fact he was another? Isn't that essentially what all politicians do? Don't get me wrong, I think the guys a douchebag, but he's less of a douchebag than (for example) a guy (or girl) who gets elected on a "peace" platform and then votes for a war. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Yes, I "doubt" that. Your basically justifying elitism by saying that "them poor dirt farmers don't know enough to take care of themselves." That's not simple math. It's simple paternalism. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Congress passed a law setting a minimum wage level for your age, experience and education? I can't imagine any other way it might have happened... -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

If I understand the queston, presumably whatever percentage of your property taxes went to the local school budget. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Is it right that someone should starve, just because they can't pay for food? Why not address simple (and inexpensive) hunger first, before moving up to $200,000 medical procedures? How many starving children could you have fed for that $200,000? How greedy are you to take the food out of their mouths for your bone marrow transplant? Don't the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? And, for D_squared: SARCASM ALERT! -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

What if someone doesn't have enough food, and dies of hunger? Or is homeless, and dies of exposure? The fact that the founding fathers established government programs to feed, clothe and shelter everyone in the nation clearly shows that they meant us to establish a national healthcare system. It does not mean that! Whoa...Sarcasm Alert! The founding fathers did not set up any such programs. I was using sarcasm by offering the obviously false fact that they had created such programs as "proof" that they wanted socialized medicine. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I haven't read the linked article, so forgive me if this was answered, but how did he defraud his constituents? -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Wouldn't it be great if we all had the kind of freedom to choose, in everything? If you didn't like the business practices of, say, the national healthcare system, you could just opt out, and not pay for it? Or, what if you didn't like the practices of your local public schools? Wouldn't it be cool if you could just decide to use a private school instead, and get your money back from the public school? -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Hey, I know. Let's teach those guys a lesson. We'll stop providing that government support they leech off, and they stop paying taxes. They take out more than they put it, so the system would be better off without them, right? Ha! We'll show them! -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

What if someone doesn't have enough food, and dies of hunger? Or is homeless, and dies of exposure? The fact that the founding fathers established government programs to feed, clothe and shelter everyone in the nation clearly shows that they meant us to establish a national healthcare system. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Forcing people to work for you without compensation is illegal?