Posts made by Shebakoby

this key lime pie. that i am eating. right now.

@Cobaltasaurus said:

@Shebakoby said:

Use the empty net bags (used to hold fruit/oranges or vegetables/onions) to cover small plants so that the deer won't nibble.

gnash teeth If you want to terrorize your local JoAnn's cutting counter person, go ask for an entire roll of tulle. You can put it over your plants and keep the deer out. Bonus points, if you especially look for tulle that has obviously been cut before and ask for the rest of said tulle, so they have to unroll all of it to measure it, and then get pissy if they don't roll it back onto the board the way it was rolled on by a machine. Because, you know, bent tulle over your plants is a crime!

gnash teeth, howl

Oh, that stuff? Yeah! And it would keep birds out too!

@surreality said:

@Shebakoby said:

The point i was making about the taxes is it's probably every bit as "gouging" as the companies' prices.

That you think this somehow addresses corporate profit behaviors in any capacity just boggles the mind. It does not. Not even in the slightest way. There is no parity here, it is not a parallel, it isn't even apples and oranges, it's apples and dump trucks.

No, it doesn't address corporate profit behavior. Why can't the government be accused of gouging as well?

@TNP said:

Plus, when it comes to prescription drugs, unless it's changed in the last couple years, it's illegal for the government to try to get better drug prices from the pharmaceutical companies for Medicare. And who pays for Medicare? The taxpayers! So we get screwed that way too.

whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat. That makes so much negative sense. Who put that stupid rule into effect and when?

@Ganymede said:

@Shebakoby said:

The point i was making about the taxes is it's probably every bit as "gouging" as the companies' prices.

I somehow missed this. You're not even close.

Taxes aren't great, especially in Canada. Those ad valorem taxes really slam the lower and middle classes. However, those people can still get quality care with little problem.

When I say "price-gouging," consider the following:

Let Service be a given procedure.

1. Health care providers that accept Public insureds (on Medicare or Medicaid) are paid $A by the government for Service.

2. Health care providers that accept Insurer J's insureds are paid $B for Service.

3. Health care providers that accept Insurer K's insureds are paid $C for Service.

4. Health care providers that provide Service to uninsured charge $D.

5. Insurer K is bigger than Insurer J, and can leverage a better price for Service. Therefore, $C < $B.

6. The government tamps down prices artificially. Therefore, $A < $C.

So, what's the price for Service? Presuming that there is an equal number of all insureds and the uninsured, then it's reasonable to presume that P = (A + B + C + D) / 4. And, since A < C < B < D, the uninsured will always pay above the "actual" price of service.

This is different than your tax scenario; this shows that the health care providers are forced to price-gouge the uninsured. Which inures to the benefit of the health insurance companies.

The crazy part about all this, is how health insurance has evolved so that people end up using it to pay for a doctor's visit. This would be akin to getting your car insurance to pay for a tune-up. I learned in economics in school that Insurance was intended to shield people from the "true" cost of a catastrophe (and in doing so, pools money to pay for said catastrophes, and the risk of going bankrupt or into serious debt is spread around). Car insurance is for accidents. Health insurance was originally intended to cover catastrophic health events (major illnesses such as those requiring hospital stays, or serious injuries). But I also learned in economics, that insurance also distorts the true costs, so that people end up paying more in the long run.

Could you imagine how much more it would cost to get tires replaced if car insurance was invoked to cover the bill?

@Miss-Demeanor all the funding in the world doesn't mean a thing if the people vote for someone else, right?

You guys need an NDP and a Liberal party to keep the other two parties on their toes. (the NDP prides itself on not taking corporate donations)

@Ganymede said:

@Shebakoby said:

The only thing I've heard that's negative about Obamacare from people I know (not stranger outliers) is that it significantly increased the cost of a state offered health insurance plan so that they can no longer afford the premiums.

Obamacare does not address the systematic problems; it rides along with it. The system essentially does three things: (1) forces insurers to carry applicants; (2) coughs up a subsidy payable to insurers on behalf of applicants based on their income; and (3) penalizes people for not being insured. This is mostly a win-situation for insurers.

Good grief, the more i learn about it, the more it looks like a sop to the insurance companies. Although I guess there's a change where it's easier for people on social assistance or minimum wage to get coverage via subsidies now?

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

@Shebakoby said:

I'm curious. If there were a significant portion of the Oregon population that had any sort of health care wait, wouldn't they contact the governor or their state representative and thus make him aware of the issue?

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Ahem. Sorry. Maybe for someone who isn't American this isn't a laughable idea. Which is all I have to say about our health care system compared to the rest of the civilized world, really.

don't Americans run to their representatives if they have a problem?

@mietze said:

One of the reasons that the governor of Oregon might not have ever experienced a health care wait is because he is of significant wealth/employment class to have never been without good health insurance accepted by all the doctors of his choice/in his area, so it was never an issue with him. The people with no insurance/shitty insurance experienced something very different.

Until about 3 years before Obamacare, my family was paying $1000/mo for shitty ass $5000 deductable catastrophic care only "health insurance". Then we joined an extremely expensive HMO but at least preventative stuff was covered. So I spent the first decade of my children's lives being given That Look in the doctor's office that would have denied us care until I said the magic words of "how much is your cash discount if I pay you in full today?" The vast majority of people who are not on good insurance plans do not have the means to do that. And doctors were not required to accept medicaid (the indigent person medical plan).

Wonder what the wait time was for a family who did not qualify for medicaid/find a provider for it who didn't have $300 to drop per visit for a pediatric visit + immunizations + medication? Would they have bothered to try to get in at all? That is why there wasn't really a wait there, as say there was when I was growing up in the military (socialized medicine that all could access, so yes, more demand, and there was indeed triage in a way that regular care visits elsewhere didn't need) because you'd already cleared a bunch of hurdles even being able to know you could call to make an appointment in the first place.

In any place perfect, no. But it is pretty icky that the reason why there was so little of that in some tiers of the medical system the US is because so many people were /denied any kind of access/ period. Look at public health/indigent clinics though and the story is way different.

I'm curious. If there were a significant portion of the Oregon population that had any sort of health care wait, wouldn't they contact the governor or their state representative and thus make him aware of the issue?

The only thing I've heard that's negative about Obamacare from people I know (not stranger outliers) is that it significantly increased the cost of a state offered health insurance plan so that they can no longer afford the premiums.

@surreality said:

I have to ask, because I'm not reading through this thread to dig for it: @Shebakoby , are you talking about an issue that personally affected you or people you personally know offline, or fringe outlier cases you've heard about having happened?

Because I would run out of fingers and toes counting the people I know personally, offline, who have been screwed up in some permanent and sometimes life-threatening fashion by the old version of US healthcare or their lack of access to it, myself included.

So if you're talking outlier strangers, please have at least a frail iota of respect for those people who are living with the consequences of the nightmare you're idealizing.

@Shebakoby said:

Don't American gas prices have a huge chunk of it in tax, too? Maybe not as much as Canada, but still?

Everything here has a pile of taxes in it; that doesn't impact the behavior of companies that, once they have established that they can acquire a certain level of profit, will continue to do precisely that. Do not think for a second the companies screaming, "Oh, gov't! Bail us out! We are in trouble even though we already raised our prices!" didn't make record profits: they absolutely did. And they kept making them even when their cost dropped substantially, because it had been proven that the market would bear the new price point, which was not 'oh the gov't just added a pile of taxes', ffs. Rare is the corporation that is going to lower their price point from a level that's proven to be sustainable even if their cost drops; they will just repeat the whole process later and cry about how their 'new normal' is being threatened and we get to go through the whole rigamarole again.

why do you think I'm "idealizing" it? I'm not. And no, I'm not talking about "stranger outliers" (interestingly enough, many of the horror stories I've heard re: USA health care WOULD be considered "stranger outliers"). US healthcare needed fixing and badly.

The point i was making about the taxes is it's probably every bit as "gouging" as the companies' prices.

@surreality said:

@Shebakoby said:

@surreality said:

@Shebakoby said:

Oh. Interesting. So, if Canada wasn't having price controls, would Americans be as badly gouged in drug prices, then?

All signs point to yes. If you look at gas prices for an example it becomes fairly clear: if they could get away with it yesterday, they will try to get away with it today and tomorrow.

Gas prices in Canada are mostly gas tax from various levels of government.

...I'm not talking about gas prices in Canada.

Don't American gas prices have a huge chunk of it in tax, too? Maybe not as much as Canada, but still?

@Ganymede said:

@Shebakoby said:

Also which 23 years were you living in Canada? If it was really long ago and in a major Eastern Canadian metropolitan center, I'm not surprised you didn't see bed shortages.

I said the opposite, actually.

I lived actively in the Toronto area from 1979 to 2003. I technically still live in that part of Canada, for I maintain my residence with my parents'.

There are bed shortages in Canada, but that's part of the way the system is calculated to operate.

oh ok i must have read that wrong.

@surreality said:

@Shebakoby said:

Oh. Interesting. So, if Canada wasn't having price controls, would Americans be as badly gouged in drug prices, then?

All signs point to yes. If you look at gas prices for an example it becomes fairly clear: if they could get away with it yesterday, they will try to get away with it today and tomorrow.

Gas prices in Canada are about almost half from gas tax from various levels of government.

@Glitch said:

Don't know how many people this might work for, but if you live in the north and are willing to make a drive, international flights out of Canada are a lot cheaper than out of America. Particularly now, with the strong dollar.

I recently went to Japan and ended up saving about $550 per ticket with an additional $200 or so from currency luck.

depending on where you fly out of, the airport taxes might be a lot less, too.

Conversely, Canadians have found that driving to a US airport and flying "domestically" to another US location is often cheaper than an international flight from a Canadian airport to the US.

@Misadventure yeah it would, depending on the size of the bottle (some are too narrow for even quarters let alone half-dollars which I have seen occasionally), and if you could not find plastic film containers. They'd have a more secure lid, too.

@Ganymede said:

@Shebakoby said:

I have to wonder where drug companies are making up the difference in order to stay in business. Price controls would certainly put a damper on new drug research in Canada, unless a manufacturer could produce it relatively cheaply to fit under the price control.

They are price-gouging the fuck out of the Americans, that's where. What the drug companies won't tell you is that several of them are heavily-invested in a variety of generic manufacturers. So, the generics aren't really competing against them: they are actually demonstrating how badly American consumers are getting price-gouged.

I do recall one time over a decade ago the governor of Oregon was in town for something, and some reporter asked him about how long health care waiting list times were in Oregon. The man was competely confused. He was like "Waiting list times, what are those even?" He didn't even know such a concept existed.

I didn't know they existed when I lived in Canada for 23 years. I only came upon them when I came to the United States.

The reason is simple: whereas Canadian hospitals have bed shortages, American hospitals usually do not. American hospitals are owned by private companies that are attempting to eat each other's market share. It is in their interests to make sure that their hospitals are not at capacity, and this results in higher costs per patient. In Canada, there's more of an interest in keeping the hospitals at over-capacity for efficiency reasons.

Oh. Interesting. So, if Canada wasn't having price controls, would Americans be as badly gouged in drug prices, then?

Also which 23 years were you living in Canada? If it was really long ago and in a major Eastern Canadian metropolitan center, I'm not surprised you didn't see bed shortages. And the waitlist wasn't as long, either.

I figure this place needs such a post. Post things that you have found to be, well, life-hacky or Heloise's Helpful Hinty.

Such as:

It's easy and convenient, I have found, to keep spare change in old film containers. They are the perfect size for even holding loonies and toonies, and you can quickly find the coin(s) that you want. I even discovered this before Heloise or whoever helpful hints published about it. Film containers can be found in thrift stores and places where people had old-style cameras but never got rid of the film containers.

Use the empty net bags (used to hold fruit/oranges or vegetables/onions) to cover small plants so that the deer won't nibble.

-When rinsing quinoa, put the quinoa in a bowl, add water, stir around for a minute or so, then pour the water off into another container, and pour it onto garden plants you don't want deer (or birds!) to eat. (then continue to rinse quinoa as usual.) If you don't have a slug problem you can always mix about a tablespoon of Alaska Fish Fertilizer into a gallon of water and pour that on plants instead, to repel deer.

-If you allow Willow-herb to grow in the same (large) pot or area as sage, deer will never touch the sage and will mow down the willow-herb and you won't care. Willow-herb is very fast growing and also doesn't care.

-Use the puffy styrofoam netting cover found on Asian Pears (to prevent bruising during shipment) to pack porcelain figurines. In some ways it's superior to newspaper, though it can be supplemented by the usual newspaper over-wrap.

@Ganymede It's true there's no simple causal link between forms of health care and money into R&D; it's simply a matter of what the government allows or does not allow. If a government is composed of individuals who frown on certain things, certain kinds of private investment will be curtailed or otherwise restricted based on a myriad of reasons. Canada just happens to have a system where there are such restrictions (such as not letting people donate CT scanners if the provincial government of the day doesn't feel like allowing it based on what they think Canadian Health Care should be).

Canada has price controls on medication, and relies heavily on generics as well, in some cases some Provinces will not cover a name brand medication if a generic is available (certain exceptions can be made if a person is allergic to nonmedicinal filler variant ingredients in a generic). I have to wonder where drug companies are making up the difference in order to stay in business. Price controls would certainly put a damper on new drug research in Canada, unless a manufacturer could produce it relatively cheaply to fit under the price control.

I have heard that Britain has a joint private-public system but its emphasis is the reverse of the United States (public first, private secondary as an afterthought) and that it works reasonably well because while everybody's covered by the public British system, there's the option to use private care if someone wishes to for reasons of speed of care. It's my understanding that all other flaws aside, speed of care is VERY quick in USA, compared to Canada (but I don't know how it stacks up against any other country's system). I do recall one time over a decade ago the governor of Oregon was in town for something, and some reporter asked him about how long health care waiting list times were in Oregon. The man was competely confused. He was like "Waiting list times, what are those even?" He didn't even know such a concept existed.

In any case Canada doesn't cover such things as dental or prescription drugs unless an individual is on government assistance; for most people this must be covered by private insurance (like say, Pacific Blue Cross) either bought on one's own, or via an employer. So some private coverage/insurance is tolerated.

Ever since i started watching such shows as Hell's Kitchen, the F word (Gordon Ramsay's british cooking competition show in his own restaurant, Claridge's in Britain), and MasterChef, I've been encouraged to come out of the rut that was dinnertime at our house.

For years it was the same, pork chops, spaghetti, chicken (mom's allergic to beef), and sometimes steak. But the way dad does steak under the broiler, it always turns out overdone without being very "browned". I dunno if he sets the rack too low (2nd rack down from the top) or what.

Then I saw the dishes being put out on those shows, and was encouraged to try making new things.

@Silver said:

@Shebakoby said:

The moral of the story is people fall through the cracks in both systems. Way more in the other one because of the whole money thing (not to mention a MUCH larger population), but still. Improvements could be made to prevent this.

There is an element of political rah-rah in the US (I'm sure it exists everywhere really) that begins its day by making assumptions about what you mean when you say anything disagreeing with them. They also think that the Real News that they listen to is superior to the Fake News other people hear, or even sometimes to the Real Life you live. Sometimes that particular fight happens with the battle cry "anecdotes are not evidence!" or "show me notarized documents" or some variant thereof.

Don't worry about it too much.

is no biggie. Some people make far too many assumptions, and they need to learn that what they're seeing isn't necesarily confirming their confirmation bias.