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by jimlongley
Mon Mar 22, 2010 7:29 pm
Forum: Gun and/or Self-Defense Related Political Issues
Topic: Special Session???
Replies: 167
Views: 19100

Re: Special Session???

PSLOwner wrote:
driver8 wrote:Nobody ever made me buy car insurance
If you drive in Texas you do.

"Texas law requires you to have auto liability insurance. If you drive in Texas, you must show that you can pay for accidents you cause. Most Texas drivers do this by buying auto liability insurance. The statutory minimum limits of liability insurance in Texas are:

Bodily Injury
- $25,000 for the death or injury of any one person, any one accident
- $50,000 for all persons in any one accident
Property Damage
- $25,000 for any one accident"
The key word in there being "MOST." You are not truly required to have auto liability insurance, all you have to do is prove financial responsibility, which you might do by establishing a trust fund, or just having a big enough bank account. It is not unusual for companies with large fleets of vehicles to "self insure" and an individual could do the same.

Similarly Mark's example of us paying for roads for him to drive on. Just a couple of hundred years ago there were private roads all over the country, and you paid a toll to the owner to use the road. Public highways are funded by the public for public use, usually, or at least ideally, by subscription, such as license and registration fees. You do not need to have a license to own a car, nor to drive one, nor does your car have to be registered, as long as you are not using the shared, publicly funded, roads.

People are not required to own cars, nor are they required to have driver's licenses, but this legislation makes it a requirement to have health coverage, even if there is no chance that you will ever need it (admittedly unlikely, but I have known a couple of people who had LARGE and stable trust funds.)

This is a legislative attempt at a one size fits all solution to a suite of complex problems, and it is as misguided as any piece of legislation ever has been.
by jimlongley
Mon Mar 22, 2010 12:10 pm
Forum: Gun and/or Self-Defense Related Political Issues
Topic: Special Session???
Replies: 167
Views: 19100

Re: Special Session???

Two problems:

"True" Democracy and "true" socialism both are theoretical in nature and are unlikely to ever be achieved on any large scale, there are just too many places where even a little deviation from the ideal will lead to the eventual collapse of the "system." Consider the "Prisoner's Dilemma" where:

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies (defects from the other) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent (cooperates with the other), the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

In the ideal circumstance, either in the Democracy or the Socialist, EACH would remain silent and would obtain the most benefit for BOTH, but it doesn't work that way. In test after test, even in communist and socialist countries where everyone is thoroughly indoctrinated from earliest childhood, very few actually go for the ideal, opting, instead, to do what they see as best for them, and eventually someone gains an advantage, which is an anethema to both democracy and socialism (put very simplistically). The bigger the game, the more chance there is that one player will consistently try to gain a personal advantage, so at national levels, with millions upon millions of players, there will always be someone whose attitude is "Hooray for me, I'll get mine, you get your own." and essentailly, in the long run anyway, destroys the system.

And that leads to the other problem (all of the above was just one of two?)

WE keep calling it a "System" and it could hardly be described as such even in the longest stretch of the imagination. "The Healthcare System" is what is getting "fixed" by the horrible legislation, and there is none, the legislation is essentially fixing something that does not exist, which means it will have to create it, and then fix it. It isn't and never was 'A' system, a single entity, it was always a bunch of interrelated systems.

A few years ago my wife had some very bad chest pains, and we took her to a local ER. This ER was a predecessor to today's "Doc in a Box" operations, although there was no way to make that distinction at the time. She was IVed, ECGed, poked, prodded, and you name it. And then the ER recommended she be hospitalised for observation, and we packed her into an ambulance, IVs, pills, and everything else and had her transpoted to the cardiac unit of a nearby hospital.

Long story short, it was probably a bowel problem.

But the hospital charged us for the IVs that traveled with her from the ER, and a variety of other stuff that the ER applied, and denied that they didn't apply that stuff because "She was NOT admitted through the ER."

Of course my insurance paid for it, so I really didn't see any cost to me, but I had a real problem with the hospital being paid for stuff that the ER did, even if the ER was not associated with the hospital, and with the insurance paying twice for stuff that we got once, driving my insurance costs up. So I protested. The insurance sided with the hospital even though there was absolutely no record of the IVs that had been applied at the ER and transported with my wife in the ambulance ever being removed, just the hospital record that they placed the IVs, which was a bald faced lie.

Without getting into all the other stuff, eventually I was called into my company's HR department and told to lay off the insurance folks or risk losing my job. Even the HR person sided with the hospital and insurance, said I was being unreasonable and that it was no big deal.

That is not ONE system, it is several, with no real interface, and no amount of Obamacare is going to change it, I see such abuses as getting easier.

I gotta go before my BP peaks again.

It is NOT a system, but it will be.

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