> For what it’s worth, none of my friends put infants in daycare due to the cost. They either got foreign au pairs or hired someone under the table for cash (very common in immigrant communities)
I'm hoping your friends are libertarians who disagree with the current political zeitgeist in Massachusetts.
It would be very depressing to hear that your friends are Liberals who publicly support these daycare laws and then privately flaunt them by 1) favoring non-American workers and 2) paying them in cash to avoid taxes
Unfortunately I think that kind of cognitive dissonance is quite common. People feel the need to make sure "everyone is safe", but then believe their ability to judge how to best do that supersedes the law. Those laws are for "other people", not us.
This is going to create a public internet free for everyone to use. But will hate speech be banned from this public-option internet? Sanders is going to spend 150b on this...I don't want Russian hackers and Neo Nazis benefit from the public's money
Can you state what immigration enforcement you support? The level of hyperbole in your response indicates that you see all immigration enforcement as cruel and unusual.
The most obvious one and one which I believe would systematically kill illegal immigration is simply penalizing businesses which employ illegal immigrants. Either with harsh fines or even possibly jail time.
ICE is simply trying to pull weeds when what you need to do is kill the root. Illegal immigrants come because of many reasons, but primary is to cheat the system that legal immigrants use to find a better life.
If you make the job opportunities sparse, you kill the desire at the root. Open borders is a problem, especially in today's climate change world but it exists because people are willing to employ illegals for below market rates. It's the worst of all worlds for all, except the employer who gets off with cheap labour.
If we do this, we'll finally see if the xenophobes put their money where their mouth is and take back the jobs illegal immigrants have "stolen" from them.
> The US gov't largely believes itself is ineffective and needs to be privatized and ran like a business. Private businesses are held up as beacons of innovation and efficiency without the "red tape" the gov't has due to purposefully created checks, balances and regulations.
The medical system is really not private. It is a hybrid of a state-controlled system and a capitalistic system. Here are some ways of how the system is state-controlled:
1. Hospitals cannot be freely constructed. One must apply for a "certificate of need" to gain permission from the government to build a hospital. This is not a free market.
2. Credentialism is BAD in our medical system. There is only one group of people approved by the government to do prescribe most medications and perform most surgeries - doctors. This is not a free market and greatly increase costs. Doctors earn a median of 300k/year and are the highest paid profession in every state. This is not a free market.
3. Hospitals are legally forced to treat anyone who shows up at their door - even if they can't afford the treatment. This is not a free market.
4. Medicare/Medicaid are forced to nearly buy any drug, regardless of cost, if it could save a live. Even if a drug is 500k/year, the system is forced to buy it. This is not a free market and greatly increases costs.
> 4. Medicare/Medicaid are forced to nearly buy any drug, regardless of cost, if it could save a live. Even if a drug is 500k/year, the system is forced to buy it. This is not a free market and greatly increases costs.
No, they aren't. Medicare Part D plans are not required to cover any particular drugs, though what they choose to cover is subject to approval by CMS.
Maybe, but those (perhaps except the first one) are
absolute requirements for a functioning system.
If a market based solution can't work with these restrictions, then the obvious conclusion is that you have to give up on market-based healthcare, not that you have to allow anyone to prescribe medicine, or have hospitals which won't treat dying people because they can't pay.
America should not be compared to a country like Sweden. It should be compared to other giant multi-ethnic countries like Brazil or India or maybe the UK.
Also in America, states are given the freedom to create (some) of their own laws. So one state might be okay sealing records after 2 years, another state might prefer to wait 10 years. IMO this is superior to a "one size fits all" approach.
The business behind this is a Washington State corporation - LA INVESTORS LLC. Is there anyway to find the names of the investors behind this business? The least we can do is expose the scammers responsible for this
That company name is listed on https://ccfs.sos.wa.gov/ (the record does not have a unique URL to link to, sorry). There is one officer listed, but it looks like the LLC was dissolved in 2016. I wonder if they're continuing operations anyway, or is somebody else spoofing their name somehow?
> A lot of divisions in America are driven by generations of policy based on racism - from redlining, white flight and zoning policies that changed the structure of cities and are now used as weapons against newcomers and change, to the very existence of many cities and governments that were created in order to be a separate white space from the larger cities nearby, and the use of these boundaries to avoid funding the basics of society for everyone (school districts, libraries, roads, etc)
I've got some bad news: when you solve racism, these problems will still exist. Because the elites will never want to live nearby poor people and zoning laws ensure they don't have to
If you "solve racism", then redlining and white flight still exist? I mean, that's true in the sense that even after the next generation stops being overtly racist, there will still be a systemic bias against black people by dint of their parents and grandparents having been confined to disinvested neighborhoods. Other than that, I don't see how your rebuttal makes sense.
> If you "solve racism", then redlining and white flight still exist?
I think he means that it will be replaced by something else and the end results will be the same. A lot of problems we attribute to racism will be there due to some other cause. Problems have multiple sources, and solving one will not solve the problem. A common debate in society is precisely about how much of a given problem is due to racism. Some people assume it's very high, and others say it is just one amongst many.
Right, but the comment above addressed that directly, and was met with a dismissive response. In fact: the roughest neighborhoods in cities like Chicago are a direct result of racism. It's not controversial or even disputable: you can look at a crime map, superimpose the redline boundaries, and see the correspondence immediately.
Is everything a result of racism? I have no idea. I kind of doubt it. But the comment above gave specific examples of things that impact us to this day that are clearly based on racism, and that won't be solved simply by a generational shift in attitudes (which has largely already occurred in the US).
Whatever the growth in administrative work in health care may have been since 1970, administrative costs are not primarily responsible for our healthcare costs; even Elizabeth Warren's own estimates of admin cost savings in M4A peg them at under 15%.
Meanwhile: the dominant component of US health spending is in fact inpatient and outpatient procedures --- services delivered by physicians and trained health care specialists --- and those people do in fact make significantly more money in the US than they do in the UK, Europe in general, or Australia.
> Doctors' salaries are not responsible for skyrocketing healthcare costs in the US
Your chart doesn't show anything useful to the point you're trying to make. It shows a massive percentage increase in the admin side as expected, without showing the base it started from, and it does not show any percentage or specific figure break-out on related costs by each group.
You need to show each group and what is being spent on them. Ideally also show the cost increase related to physician and nurse total compensation over the last eg 10, 20, 30 years so we can see how much cost inflation there is related to that segment of US healthcare over the prime years of healthcare cost inflation.
For a supposedly free market country it's odd that the US allows the supply of doctors to be restricted. Removing restrictions on the numbers of doctors who can qualify would automatically reduce the average income while increasing the supply of doctors.
I'm hoping your friends are libertarians who disagree with the current political zeitgeist in Massachusetts.
It would be very depressing to hear that your friends are Liberals who publicly support these daycare laws and then privately flaunt them by 1) favoring non-American workers and 2) paying them in cash to avoid taxes