Actually, it’s worse than that. Turns out the Obamacare stats for “enrollees” includes people who abandoned a policy in their shopping cart. Whereas people who endure the 4473 paperwork that proceeds a NICS check are ALL going to buy a gun. That said, in direct contravention of the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, most states require a NICS check for citizens seeking to exercise their natural and civil right to bear arms. How many of them carry a firearm on a daily basis? Not so many. Maybe  . . . ten percent? Still, I bet Obama’s Boyz would settle for that kind of conversion ratio.
And the NICS background checks would be under reported. With a Concealed Carry permit in AZ, they don’t need to call in the background check.
Also any state that requires a permit to purchase. One NICS check when you apply, then you can buy as many firearms as you’d like without further checks.
How exactly does it work, given that NICS is mandated by Federal law? Did Arizona just tell the Feds to shove it?
The government’s incompetence makes me laugh.
The only things government is somewhat decent at:
1. Spying on people
2. Killing
3. Collecting taxes
4. Recklessly spending money
5. Avoiding responsibility for the ills it causes
That should tell you everything you need to know about government.
Especially that killing part. For all the liberals’ hand wringing and crocodile tears over so-called “gun violence”, the fact remains that if you died by firearm within the last 100 years, by far the most likely perpetrator of that deadly violence was a government. Either your own, or somebody else’s. Let the gun grabbing, professional complainers chew on that.
The government – particularly the current administration – desperately wants you to worry about the single deranged individual with a gun. They want you to believe that the only sane response is to pass even more laws for criminals to disregard. That’s how safety is achieved, it’s “common sense.” There is no mention of the inconvenient truth that the government and the agents thereof are, by a significant margin, the most successful mass murderers known to man. Arms, in civilian hands, are effective against both the deranged killer and the deranged government.
Makes me feel good seeing the chart the way it is. Obamacare is failing & hundreds of millions of dollars put into it…. Guns are growing in popularity among all masses & and helps grow the firearm business… yet the government makes millions from taxes from sales…. Is obamacare a dead deal yet?
No, you see, we need to move to a single payer system.
Government can’t handle Obamacare correctly, but we should just trust them to take over the entire healthcare industry directly. It’ll be great! (/sarcasm)
Single payer would have worked fine in terms of technical process and would have avoided these issues; medicare works. Now, whether you want the government so heavily invested in what was a private market is another question.
I think it would make a lot more sense than the clusterball we have currently.
They’ve said from the beginning that Single-Payer is exactly what they wanted, but they knew they couldn’t make the sale to the American people. So they’ve set up this clusterball, knowing all along that it would end up this way. Now, as you’ve just noted, Single-Payer looks positively awesome by comparison. BOOM! They get their socialized medicine, and the voters actually THANK them for it!
That is a false assumption that many believers in single payer make. Single payer is not just the processing of insurance claims. A single payer must also set prices, allocate resources as compensation to providers falls and doctors and hospitals go out of business. They also have to take over the medical education system since you can’t go 300K in debt, earn minimum wage for 5 years after school and live off the net wages of government medicine. The highly dysfunctional British National Health Service is the largest employer in the UK and I believe the fifth largest employer in the world. The NHS provides the worst medical care in “old Europe”, i.e., what was called Western Europe before the Wall came down.
Dr. Anthony Danials, a British physician who writes under the name of Theodore Dalrymple, wrote an article attesting to the fact that there is huge gap between what Britains believe about their healthcare and what it really is. Some 75% of the UK believes that “the NHS provides the best care with the latest medical techniques.” Dalrymple documents that that statement is blatantly false. He wonders why Britains have that impression. I attribute it to two things. Healthcare is like a gun. When you need you really need it. Unlike a gun, you will certainly need critical care at some point in your life and I don’t mean fixing your broken arm.) Britains don’t understand that until they get inferior care or outright denial. That is your 25%. The other reason for this misperception is that you cannot import healthcare. It is what they know. Canada shows similar approval rates for their system but they know where they can go when they can’t get timely critical care in Canada. A dirty secret among Canadian healthcare bureaucrats is that they are in fear that the US will adopt single payer. Without the US safety valve Canadian healthcare collapses.
tdviina pretty much nailed. If you don’t deal with a system on a regular basis, you tend to believe the propoganda that the system is great. The people that do know the truth don’t have a loud enough voice to override the partyline of those in power.
Single payer looks “positively awesome” to those already inclined to feel that way. For most Americans, I think this debacle only makes them distrust government involvement in the healthcare industry even more.
Single payer looks “positively awesome” to those people who believe that they are part of the elite or haven’t been seriously ill yet. To former it doesn’t matter because they get special treatment and the latter get awakening when they are told that it will be six months before they start getting chemo for a tumor that was diagnosed 1 year to late. In other words they die.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/11/24/britain-fall-behind-on-cancer-survival-rates_n_1111590.html?just_reloaded=1
Privatized healthcare is great when you can afford it. To be able to afford it for everything you will realistically need over the course of your life, you have to be somewhere within the top 2% of the population by income.
For everyone else, single payer system is better, because it is always available. It’s also cheaper overall, as it uses money more efficiently (look up at stats on money used per patient vs outcome rates) – at least, this is the case in every single Western country that tried it. There’s no reason to believe that US would be different.
As I thought, you are no Libertarian which explains why you put social rights ahead of political rights.
Your 2% meme is just a leftwing talking points. Any doctor, regardless of their political beliefs will tell you that cancer survival rates depend on early detection and treatment. That means you have to access to medical care. The United States has the highest cancer survival rate in the world. The UK is among the worst. That means that there better access to healthcare across the income spectrum in the United States than in the UK, As Dr, Daniels point out, the UK has the worst healthcare system in Western Europe and very low cancer survival rates is indication of very poor access to medical care among the general population.
And medical tourism to the United States from Canada is not limited to the rich. Most large Canadian employers have catastrophic health insurance as a benefit. And private insurance rates for this kind of coverage is quite affordable.
I’m a social democrat (by European definition; I suppose that makes me a pinko commie in US?), albeit with libertarian leanings. I do not prioritize social freedoms ahead of political and personal ones – e.g. I consider freedom of speech to be sacrosanct, and shake my head in disbelief at the notion that a citizen can be disenfranchised from voting for whatever reason (like felons in US). I do, however, believe that most personal rights, and especially the ones that deal with property, have to be balance the interests of individual with the interests of society where those two are in conflict.
Regarding Canadian medical tourism in US, hard stats are available, and they do show that it is practiced by a tiny minority. Most Canadians are happy with their system. In polls, they do say that they would be happier with American healthcare standards, but only if their insurance would cover it while remaining at the same level (i.e. they are not happy with your bang for the buck).
I don’t know why you keep focusing on UK NHS – it’s widely recognized as being particularly bad bureaucratic system, which is pretty typical of Brits. Why not look at Germany, or Finland, or France, or Australia?
Cancer survival? We all die from cancer eventually, that’s what being old gets you. But if you look at the stats of who survives and who doesn’t, I am pretty certain that US system basically focuses on the survival of those who can pay for it, which tend to be not just rich, but old people. Sure, you can extend the lifespan somewhat by exponentially more expensive remedies and procedures, but the returns are quickly diminishing there – so at the age of 90 you live for two more years instead of one more, for all that money. Or, for the same money, you can treat easily preventable diseases in people who have decades of productive life ahead of them. Yes, that’s your dreaded “death panels”: how dare the society decide who lives and who dies, rather than the insurers?
Anyway, if you look at overall stats, the picture is very clear: US healthcare industry, today, spends the biggest amount of money per patient worldwide, while lagging behind most other Western countries in terms of overall results, but especially so on preventative care (i.e. the balance of preventative/corrective is strongly skewed in favor of the latter in US).
Also, single payer does not imply that there is no insurance options available outside of the government-run system. It means that everyone has to be insured in said government-run system – and so everyone pays taxes to keep it running – but if you have extra cash to spend, you can always go pay a private doctor/clinic to get things done better, faster etc. Some systems do restrict the latter, such as Canada (which is why you see medical tourism among the rich coming for expensive treatments they can afford to US), but that part does not have to be copied.
Although cancer treatment costs are higher in the US than Europe, the survival rates are also higher. Not just higher than the UK, Europe. Look it up. Also, “everyone” will not pay taxes for single pay. Lower incomes will have their insurance coverage subsidized by the rest of us.
Get a NICS check, get a gun. Enroll in Obamacare, get raped. Isn’t that pretty much it?
I remember when NICS was first brought online. True, it did have some bugs and some gun buyers were erroneously denied in the first few months. But its rollout worked far better than Obamacare. Not a endorsement of NICS, but this shows how inefficient and corrupt the federal government has become.
I am sure all the gang bangers and drug dealers signed up. If they are in charge of more than 50 people (mules, dealers, etc) I am sure they now have group health insurance.
No worries, now that your covered you can go out, party, sleep with strange people, and beat yourself up because you can afford to take more risk.
Shoot up a whole rival gang if you like! Thanks Obamacare!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/12/obamacare-ads-colorado_n_4261448.html
don’t forget this:
http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/01/smallbusiness/sex-workers-obamacare/
Please help me with this because I am confused; If I can not keep my high rate insurance plan and am forced to enroll in a government plan, do I still get to smoke cigars and drink a case of beer a day without feeling guilty about what it might cost the rest of you? (please say yes, please say yes…)
“If I can not keep my high rate insurance plan and am forced to enroll in a government plan”
You make the tacit assumption (or seem to imply, at least) that the government plan will be cheaper. Mostly goes the other way so far, especially for those who don’t qualify for them juicy subsidies (which cut out before you reach very far into the middle class).
“do I still get to smoke cigars and drink a case of beer a day without feeling guilty about what it might cost the rest of you?”
Since Obamacare plans hit smokers for much higher premiums than non-smokers, I don’t see your point about the smoking. Drinking? I haven’t seen any info on that yet.
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