[luke warm]

 Elianna, on 2012-March-16, 20:22, said:

It is much cheaper for companies to pay for birth control than it is to pay for pregnancies.

you'd think a for profit company would know that, eh? i think if what you believe to be true were actually true, these companies would do as you (and others) want... but that doesn't really get to the crux of the matter, does it? should the gov't have the right to force a company (let's forget the other mandates for now) to freely provide a service or product to consumers? and don't believe for a minute that, if this holds up, consumers won't pay for it (much like taxes, which are likewise passed along - for the most part)

[hrothgar]

 luke warm, on 2012-March-17, 19:40, said:

should the gov't have the right to force a company (let's forget the other mandates for now) to freely provide a service or product to consumers?

You mean like the requirement that cars include seat belts and airbags?
Or the requirement that milk is pasteurized?

You might not like this, but there are all sorts of examples where the government regulates the characteristics of the products that private companies sell

Moreover, I don't think that most of us see any problem with this

[awm]

Preventative care in general hasn't been shown to save money. There are a couple issue; one is that providing preventative care to a hundred people may not actually be cheaper than treating one sick person, another is that preventative care may allow someone to live longer and contract some even more expensive disease.

However, birth control as a specific case has been shown cost-efficient. Not only are the costs associated with actually having a baby a lot more than birth control, but unlike the person prevented from getting sick (who can always get sick years later), prevented pregnancies don't lead to more pregnancies later.

My impression is that insurance companies are not generally opposed to providing birth control, which does save them money. The problem is that certain employers who provide health insurance to their employees are opposed to that insurance plan covering birth control. This being the case, the insurance company is happy to sell them a plan (quite possibly at the same or higher premium) that doesn't cover birth control. The position of the government is that this is discrimination against women.

What's interesting is that the actual content of Ms. Fluke's testimony had nothing to do with sex or contraception. It was all about the negative health consequences of denying coverage to women, as experienced by herself and her friends at (Jesuit) Georgetown University. Some significant percentage of women are prescribed these drugs for health reasons that have nothing to do with preventing pregnancy (I've heard figures as high as 25%). Even though Georgetown's plan officially would cover contraception that was prescribed for non-pregnancy-preventive purposes, students had difficulty filling these prescriptions because people would claim they were just "trying to get birth control;" the whole thing sounds quite awful.

[mike777]

If you never heard of a person putting a dog on top of a car for a family trip....pretty naive....granted I am old but this is not that uncommon. You make it sound like one person in the world did this.


granted spanking and smoking and alot of other things you may think wierd were very common.


At some point you need to realize the world of more than a few years ago.


I mean two people married at 12 very common. Today we call the police and you go away for life.
See English playwright who called out...for his Juliet/
----


With all of that said does the Republican party seem a bit wierd in 2012...hell yes.....

but I voted Mcgovern in 72 so I may be biased.

[kenberg]

I always win in lunchroom discussions citing dumb things we have done in the past. I continue to marvel at being alive, in possession of all my limbs, and that my kids are still speaking to me. But I have never strapped a dog to the top of a car. One of our dogs we got because she was abandoned. She showed no signs of mistreatment, she did show an interest in school buses, and would run along beside me as I biked. Our guess was that she was riding across the country in the back of a pickup and impulsively (she was quite impulsive) took a leap out without anyone knowing.

Romney is a mystery to me. Of all the candidates, I think I understand Santorum the best. I definitely do not want him as a president, but I get him in a way that I don't get Romney. I suppose that's a good part of his appeal.

I was spanked. And more. And I smoked. And I voted for McGovern. I even voted for Dukakis, which I find harder to justify than voting for McGovern. Marry at 12? I missed that one.

[y66]

From Ross Douthat's blog post on Conservatism's Limbaugh problem:

Quote

The best evidence that conservatism has a Limbaugh problem, in this sense, isn’t so much the fact that the nation’s most popular right-wing talk show host sometimes says offensive things that create a backlash against the American right as a whole. Rather, it’s that when the spotlight isn’t on Limbaugh, and when his excesses aren’t front-and-center and thus impossible to deny, too many conservatives — including not just finger-in-the-wind politicians, but some of the country’s most sagacious conservative intellectuals — are weirdly reluctant to acknowledge that there are any valid critiques of him at all.

Weird indeed.

[Winstonm]

Quote

....some of the country’s most sagacious conservative intellectuals — are weirdly reluctant to acknowledge that there are any valid critiques of him at all

You have to understand the language. Their acknowledgement comes in the form of these phrases: "What about Maher? Why isn't he criticized?"

It's a slick move. It's a yes, but answer sans yes. I would call it a red herring, but someone with more education in logical fallacies can surely correct me.

[Winstonm]

Quote

kenberg
"....Santorum....I definitely do not want him as a president"

Gee, Ken, I can't imagine why you would say that.

Quote

As president, Santorum says he would instruct his attorney general to prosecute those who distribute content his administration deems "obscene."

He then proceded to condemn the totalitarian theocratic regime in Iran for forcing Islamic law onto its citizens and said he would bomb Iran into accepting the belief that he deemed was the correct one.

I mean, geez, Ken, what's not to like?

[jdeegan]

Saw an enlightening panel show on PBS last night. It featured three folks from Massachusetts who were familiar with Romney the politician, supposedly one Democrat, one Republican and one independent. It became evident in the discussion that Romney the presidential candidate will have a serious LDS problem, esp. in the South, in California and parts of the Midwest. Bottom line is that many fundamentalist Christians hate Mormons. This is why Santorum has been winning primaries in the South despite the obvious fact that he has almost zero electability in November.

Unless events turn seriously against him, Obama should have an easy time in the general election.

[kenberg]

It seems to me that the most devastating development for Romney is that it will be completely clear that a sizable chunk in his own party really really doesn't want him. It's not that they prefer someone else, it's that they prefer anyone else. If s/he is breathing and not in jail, s/he is a viable alternative. I really can't recall seeing anything like this in either party.


How will it go?

A Republican friend who, like me, is approximately equally unenthusiastic about all religions, tells me he has a difficult time thinking of Romney as a Republican. As near as I can tell, he doesn't believe a word Romney says. No, he won't be voting for Santorum. He usually likes to talk about politics but he is quiet now, sort of depressed I guess.

With all the Super Pac money that will come in, I think that this will be the absolutely ugliest race we have ever seen. I can't even guess at the outcome, although it is truly difficult to see Romney getting a large percentage of the votes.

[Winstonm]

Quote

it is truly difficult to see Romney getting a large percentage of the votes.

But he may get the most important of the populace vote - the corporate ones.

[blackshoe]

Since when do corporations get to vote?

[Winstonm]

 blackshoe, on 2012-March-21, 18:52, said:

Since when do corporations get to vote?

Since the Supremes made them people - haven't you heard - they get to vote millions of times and it is all legal?

[Cthulhu D]

 mike777, on 2012-March-16, 21:27, said:

I thought there were studies out there that say preventive care does not reduce overall health care costs.

I mean testing the whole population for various illnesses will save some lives, granted, but it is very expensive.

Preventative care for any particular illness is a massive cost saving, as long as you're comparing it to 'waiting for them to get sick and turn up in ER.' If you're baselining it against 'and then they get sick and die and we don't have to pay for ongoing care' it is economical not to provide treatment. You can use this argument to make smoking look like a good idea, but it's completely ridiculous analysis because it ignores secondary effects (if you get sick and die of cancer at 40, the government is missing 20 years of taxes, but this isn't included in the 'smoking reduces health care costs so you shouldn't ban smoking' line of reasoning). From the state's perspective, not only does it have to pay for you to be in hospital (and it can pay this directly in a system like Norway, or indirectly in the US system where your taxable income is reduced because your premiums are tax deductible and you get charged for the guys clogging the ER who cannot pay), it also misses on the sweet, sweet tax harvest that you are not pulling in because you are dead or dying somewhere.

However, I think the reality in most countries that are not a dystopic wasteland, if some guy gets brought to ER going into Diabetic shock, you're going to have to treat him and it's really expensive. This is the current state in most OECD countries.

Given that, preventative care is ridiculously cost effective for any healthcare system that promises to treat you if you turn up in an ER whether you can pay or not.

[blackshoe]

 Winstonm, on 2012-March-21, 19:46, said:

Since the Supremes made them people - haven't you heard - they get to vote millions of times and it is all legal?

Yeah, right.

[kenberg]

 Cthulhu D, on 2012-March-21, 21:33, said:

Given that, preventative care is ridiculously cost effective for any healthcare system that promises to treat you if you turn up in an ER whether you can pay or not.

I like preventive care because I like not getting sick. I'm not sure I have to think about it beyond that. I suppose if the cost were outlandish, say a costly procedure to prevent an unlikely disease, then I might have to think.

Some aspects of contraception seem to be medical care, others not, or at least less so. Being fitted for an internal contraceptive device yes, condoms maybe not. The difference is that one requires a doctor, the other doesn't. If the government thinks, and I don't particularly disagree, that it's a good idea to subsidize condom use then they could just do it. No need to involve insurance companies or doctors. Vegetables are good for us. If the government wants to encourage us to eat vegetables, no doctor is required, no insurance company needs to be forced to give us vegetables.

The OP concerned contraception, so free condoms from the government does not solve the total problem. No doubt the church objects to all forms. I think if a doctor is needed, it's medical, and the church simply has to broadly support medical and not get into what the doctor and the patient are doing.

[Cthulhu D]

 kenberg, on 2012-March-22, 12:22, said:

I like preventive care because I like not getting sick. I'm not sure I have to think about it beyond that. I suppose if the cost were outlandish, say a costly procedure to prevent an unlikely disease, then I might have to think.

Decisions are more routine than that - using a vaccine with known side effects when my risk of exposure to the disease is practically zero is a waste of time which is why you don't get vaccinated against encephalitis when you go to Thailand unless you're planning on working in rice paddies or similar. If the cost + risk > prevention it's not worth doing, and because prevention can be quite small costs and risk can be low as well.

Quote

The OP concerned contraception, so free condoms from the government does not solve the total problem. No doubt the church objects to all forms. I think if a doctor is needed, it's medical, and the church simply has to broadly support medical and not get into what the doctor and the patient are doing.

It's the pill though which is a prescription drug, and does indeed involve a doctor and may be proscribed as a medical treatment. But from the state's perspective if all the people who didn't want a baby could manage to use a condom and the pill they cost savings are mammoth, so they really want you to. Otherwise they have to deal with you getting syphilis, an abortion or an adoption later and all those cost way more.

[Winstonm]

Now, even Santorum plans to vote for Obama.

Quote

Santorum told supporters in San Antonio. "If you're going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have...

Meanwhile, the Santorum handlers are once again busy telling CNN, No, he didn't mean that...

[y66]

Did you hear the one about Mitt Romney's dog?

[Winstonm]

As it turns out, these right-wing ultra-conservatives are not moralists but simply closeted bigots. From YahooNews.com:

Quote

White House senior adviser David Plouffe lashed out on Sunday over a pair of comments by Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to President Barack Obama's reaction to the Trayvon Martin shooting.

"Those two comments are really irresponsible," Plouffe said on CNN. "I would consider them reprehensible."

"If I had a son he would look like Trayvon," Obama said on Friday.

"Is the president suggesting if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it wouldn't look like him?" Gingrich said Friday on Sean Hannity's radio show. "That's just nonsense. I mean, dividing this country up, it is a tragedy this young man was shot."

In a separate radio interview Friday, Santorum had a similar reaction.

"What the president of the United States should do is try to bring people together, not use these types of horrible and tragic individual cases to try to drive a wedge in America," Santorum said.

At a certain point this nonsense just gets sick.