"Leave Californicated. Really.

There are no smog tests in Florida. There were in Chicago but so long as your "Readiness" code was clean and the sniffer went up the pipe and was good, they didn't care how you did it -- just that the car passed."

This crap even reached Alaska where there are more moose than cars. They'd fail you if you had an aftermarket radiator cap or oil filter. But it's finally going away after almost 30 years. But we're "phasing" it out so that the ripoff auto mechanics can continue to rip people off even after the EPA gave its official blessing to get rid of it.

What is frustrating to me is that the majority of folks don't see these industries as wards of the state. Each of this short list of industries cost a lot per unit of production which hoses the taxpayer or the individual and sometimes both.

Military Industrial Complex/Defense/spying/war on terror
Agriculture/pesticides/Food manufacturers/Food Stamps/illegal immigration
Prisons/Guard Unions/Law Enforcement/Courts/War on Drugs
Medical Device makers/Pharmaceutical manfg & Distribution/Health Insurance/Hospitals/Medicare/Medicade/AARP/AMA/trial lawyers
Building Highways/Prisons/Prevailing Wage Acts
Banking/Finance/Real Estate
Universities/Student Loans
Automobile Manufacturers/Dealers
Not sure where this one fits in, but it is another ward
H1 Visa/Technology

I used to travel a lot for business and was able to sample some healthcare

In Germany, I was in a accident, and the outpatient first visit and the followup were free (along with the medication)
In Canada, I came down with a serious respiratory infection, the medical visit (outpatient) and the drugs were free.
In NYC i had a relapse of the respiratory infection, and even with insurance it cost more than $100 out of pocket.
Several other places in the states, that were in network, also cost a fortune in co-pays and deductibles.

I'm going to be liberal here, but I would argue that our society should provide a basic level of care, including free clinics for the poor. (Somewhat like Karl's description of charity care.) If the basic level doesn't help you, that's too bad. Not everyone can get a transplant, or two hips, or the latest cancer treatment that will extend your life for six months at a cost of $100k per month.

Its sad or ludicrous that people show up at the ER for an infected tooth or other less emergent illnesses because they have no where to go.

Phxkevin:

Charity care exists now, but it's not as charitable as it seems. When they make a profit off of paying patients, a doctor, clinic, or hospital needs to offset those profits with "losses" in order to evade taxes.

Take an appendectomy for example. It's a life-saving surgery that's simple and easy to do. The average payment by insurance companies is about $2500. If you don't have insurance, they'll bill you $25,000 or more for it. If you don't pay, they then have a $25,000 tax deduction and you have ruined credit unless you get them to classify it as charity care.

If you negotiate with a provider before services are rendered and pay cash upfront, you can usually get that $2500 rate. But in an emergency, you're hardly in a position or state of mind to negotiate.

You can also get a very deductible insurance plan so you can pay the $2500 instead of the $25,000. It's essentially a protection racket.

Having a free health care system at the federal level is unconstitutional. I'd have no problem with such clinics if funded and operated at the local level. If you're poor, you get basic services for free. If you're low income you pay something. If you're middle class, you pay a little more.

Have it similar to a public defender. You would get the doctors and nurses just out of school, didn't go to a top school, and didn't do so well in their class.

To clarify what was clearly ill-refuted. This from the fathers of modern libertarianism, Murray Rothbard and Leonard Liggio. Page 182, "The Betrayal of the American Right"

Leonard and I were now “left-wing Democrats” indeed on foreign
policy. But still more: we were chafing at the bit. Why was
SANE ever so careful not to discuss imperialism? Why did it
clearly favor the U.S. over the Soviet Union? We were now not
only looking for an isolationist movement; we were looking for an
anti-imperialist movement, a movement that zeroed in on the
American Empire as the great threat to the peace, and therefore to
the liberty, of the world. That movement did not yet exist.

In addition to our re-evaluation of the origins and nature of the
Cold War, we engaged in a thorough reassessment of the whole
“left-right” ideological spectrum in historical perspective. For it
was clear to us that the European Throne-and-Altar Conservatism
that had captured the right wing was statism in a virulent and
despotic form; and yet only an imbecile could possibly call these
people “leftists.” But this meant that our old simple paradigm of the
“left Communist/total government . . . right/no government” continuum,
with liberals on the left of center and conservatives on the
right of center, had been totally incorrect. We had therefore been
misled in our basic view of the spectrum and in our whole conception
of ourselves as natural “extreme rightists.” There must have
been a fatal flaw in the analysis. Plunging back into history, we concentrated
on the reality that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
laissez-faire liberals, radicals, and revolutionaries constituted
the “extreme left” while our ancient foes, the conservatives, the
Throne-and-Altar worshippers, constituted the right-wing Enemy.

Leonard Liggio then came up with the following profound
analysis of the historical process, which I adopted.

First, and dominant in history, was the Old Order, the ancien
régime, the regime of caste and frozen status, of exploitation by a
war-making, feudal or despotic ruling class, using the church and
the priesthood to dupe the masses into accepting its rule. This was
pure statism; and this was the “right wing.” Then, in seventeenthand
eighteenth-century Western Europe, a liberal and radical
opposition movement arose, our old heroes, who championed a
popular revolutionary movement on behalf of rationalism, individual
liberty, minimal government, free markets and free trade,
international peace, and separation of Church and State—and in
opposition to Throne and Altar, to monarchy, the ruling class,
theocracy, and war. These—“our people”—were the Left, and the
purer their libertarian vision the more “extreme” a Left they were.

So far, so good, and our analysis was not yet so different from
before; but what of socialism, that movement born in the nineteenth
century which we had always reviled as the “extreme left”?
Where did that fit in? Liggio analyzed socialism as a confused middle-
of-the road movement, influenced historically by both the libertarian
and individualist Left and by the conservative-statist
Right. From the individualist Left the socialists took the goals of
freedom: the withering away of the State, the replacement of the
governing of men by the administration of things (a concept
coined by the early nineteenth-century French laissez-faire libertarians
Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer), opposition to the
ruling class and the search for its overthrow, the desire to establish
international peace, an advanced industrial economy and a high
standard of living for the mass of the people. From the conservative
Right the socialists adopted the means to attempt to achieve
these goals: collectivism, state planning, community control of the
individual. But this put socialism in the middle of the ideological
spectrum. It also meant that socialism was an unstable, self-contradictory
doctrine bound to fly apart rapidly in the inner contradiction
between its means and its ends. And in this belief we were
bolstered by the old demonstration of my mentor Ludwig von
Mises that socialist central planning simply cannot operate an
advanced industrial economy.

The Socialist movement had, historically, also suffered ideologically
and organizationally from a similar inner contradiction:
with Social Democrats, from Engels to Kautsky to Sidney Hook,
shifting inexorably rightward into accepting and strengthening the
State apparatus and becoming “left” apologists for the Corporate
State, while other socialists, such as Bakunin and Kropotkin,
shifted leftward toward the individualist, libertarian pole. It was
clear, too, that the Communist Party in America had taken, in
domestic affairs, the same “rightward” path—hence the similarity
which the “extreme” red-baiters had long discerned between
Communists and liberals. In fact, the shift of so many ex-Communists
from left to the conservative Right now seemed to be not very
much of a shift at all; for they had been pro-Big Government in the
1930s and “Twentieth Century American” patriots in the 1940s,
and now they were still patriots and statists.

From our new analysis of the spectrum we derived several
important corollaries. One was the fact that alliance between libertarians
and conservatism appeared, at the very least, to be no
more “natural” than the older alliance during the 1900s and 1920s
between libertarians and socialists. Alliances now seemed to
depend on the given historical context.10 Second, the older intense
fear of Marxian socialism seemed inordinate; for conservatives had
long ignored Mises’s demonstration of the inevitable breakup of
socialist planning, and had acted as if once a country had gone
socialist, then that was the end, that the country was doomed and
the process irreversible. But if ours—and Mises’s—analysis was
right, then socialism should fall apart before too many years had
elapsed, and much more rapidly than the Old Order, which had
had the capacity to last unchanged for centuries. Sure enough, by
the early 1960s we already had seen the inspiring development of
Yugoslavia, which after its break from Stalin had evolved rapidly
away from socialism and central planning and in the direction of
the free market, a course which the rest of Eastern Europe and
even Soviet Russia were already beginning to emulate. And yet in
contrast, we saw to our chagrin that even the most economicminded
of the New Right were so caught up in their hysterical
anti-Communism that they refused to greet or even acknowledge
the breakup of socialism in Eastern Europe. This blind spot was
obviously connected with the conservatives’ long-time refusal to
acknowledge the corollary breakup of the international Stalinist
monolith within the Communist movement; for both of these
insights would have weakened greatly the Right’s characteristic
campaign of hysteria against the supposedly invincible and everexpanding
Communist world—an expansion that could, in its eyes,
be checked only by nuclear war.

Our analysis was greatly bolstered, moreover, by our becoming
familiar with the work of domestic revisionism of an exciting group
of historians who had studied under William Appleman Williams
at the University of Wisconsin. Williams himself, in The Contours
of American History, Williams’s students who founded Studies on the
Left in 1959, and particularly the work of Williams’s student
Gabriel Kolko in his monumental Triumph of Conservatism (1963),
changed our view of the twentieth-century American past, and
hence of the genesis and nature of the current American system.
From them we learned that all of us believers in the free market
had erred in believing that somehow, down deep, Big Businessmen
were really in favor of laissez-faire, and that their deviations from
it, obviously clear and notorious in recent years, were either “sellouts”
of principle to expedience or the result of brainwashing and
infusing of guilt into these businessmen by liberal intellectuals.

This is the general view on the Right; in the remarkable phrase
of Ayn Rand, Big Business is “America’s most persecuted minority.”
Persecuted minority, indeed! To be sure, there were charges
aplenty against Big Business and its intimate connections with Big
Government in the old McCormick Chicago Tribune and especially
in the writings of Albert Jay Nock; but it took the Williams-Kolko
analysis, and particularly the detailed investigation by Kolko, to
portray the true anatomy and physiology of the America scene. As
Kolko pointed out, all the various measures of federal regulation
and welfare statism, beginning in the Progressive period, that Left
and Right alike have always believed to be a mass movement
against Big Business, are not only backed to the hilt by Big Business
at the present time, but were originated by it for the very purpose
of shifting from a free market to a cartelized economy. Under
the guise of regulations “against monopoly” and “for the public
welfare,” Big Business has succeeded in granting itself cartels and
privileges through the use of government.

As for the liberal intellectuals, their role has been to serve as
“corporate liberals,” as weavers of sophisticated apologies to
inform the masses that the rulers of the American corporate state
are ruling on behalf of the “common good” and the “general welfare.”
The role of the corporate liberal intellectual in justifying the
ways of the modern State to man is precisely equivalent to the
function of the priest in the Oriental despotisms who convinced
the masses that their Emperor was all-wise and divine.

Liggio and I also focused anew on the crucial problem of the
underdeveloped countries. We came to realize that the revolutions
in the Third World were not only in behalf of national independence
against imperialism but also, and conjointly, against feudal
land monopolists in behalf of the just ownership of their land by the
long-oppressed peasantry. Genuine believers in justice and in private
property, we concluded, should favor the expropriation of the
stolen and conquered lands of Asia and Latin America by the peasants
who, on any sort of libertarian theory, were and still are their
proper and just owners. And yet, tragically, only the Communists
have supported peasant movements; American or native “free
enterprisers,” when they did not ignore the crucial land problem
altogether, invariably and tragically came down on the side of the
oppressive landlords in the name of “private property.” But the
“private” property of these monopoly landlords is “private” only by
virtue of State conquest, theft, and land grants; and any genuine
believer in the rights of private property must then side with the
drive of the peasants to get their land back. The peasants of the
world are not socialists or communists; instinctively, they are individualists
and libertarians, consumed with a perfectly understandable
passion to reclaim the right to own their own lands. The Zapata
revolution in Mexico and the Reies Tijerina movement in the
Southwest, are only the most clear-cut examples of the profoundly
libertarian struggle of peasants to defend or reclaim their just
property titles from loot and conquest at the hands of the central
government.

http://library.mises.org/books/Murray%20....

This entire 13th chapter is an interesting read. Rothbard was a free enterprise, civil liberties proponent, an anti centrist. The right has always been the social elite run the game and the rest of the people are merely managed as part of the landscape. Isn't this what Obama care is? Isn't this continual bailout of the TBTF banks and massive infusion of money into big business the same thing? Hasn't every energy policy fallen into the hands of big oil, at the expense of the independent and the guy on the street? Wasn't the problem in Japan that they moved to protect the people on top and have starved out the people who worked in productive capacity? Are they not attempting to bail out big government in Europe? This is the politics we all need to recognize in order to not be drawn into the nonsense we see on the stage today. I believe Karl has done a good job of bringing a lot of this to light.

Here is another interesting article I found by looking up a name Rothbard mentioned in the last chapter of this book. In fact, there are 2 names, the guy who wrote the article and the guy the article was about.

http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2009/06/03/....

Pay, you can only expense your expenses, not your profits. A bill for $25,000 for what costs $2000 that goes unpaid is a $2000 loss, not a $25,000 loss. As a matter of fact, the opposite is likely true as well, that payment of a reduced amount isn't a gain, which i have also seen discussed here. Medical care is a loss and can't be called a gain. A gain in a reduction of debt would come from something business like, ala an auto loan where the loss was $10,000 to the company in a bad debt, settled for $1500. Even then, if the guy lost the car, it would be difficult to say he made $8500. Debt forgiveness for a bad home loan could possibly be a gain. Everything has to do with what the opposite side of the equation, what was gained in the transaction is.

There are a lot of people that talk about this stuff that know nothing about accounting. If you had trouble with basic accounting or didn't take tax accounting, it is probably a good idea not to discuss these matters, as your discussion is more than likely a good chance for misunderstanding. This goes from tax issues to banking, which is nothing but an accounting ledger.

Mann - you are the one that actually has the accounting wrong.

An uncollected $25,000 bill - assuming zero recovery - would flow thru as a $25,000 expense (write-off of your accounts receivable)

The transaction would be a net zero.

$25K initially recorded to income ... and then $25K expensed for the write off.

Pay_lay_ale

Quote:

Charity care exists now, but it's not as charitable as it seems. When they make a profit off of paying patients, a doctor, clinic, or hospital needs to offset those profits with "losses" in order to evade taxes.

I would argue that charity care does not really exist now, in our area, the so called charity hospitals are really just for profits that pay no income tax and reduced real estate taxes. They send the indigent over to the county hospital.

We have national healthcare now with veterans, federal employees, medicare/medicaid, women and infants and etc (plus all the state and local government employees on a "state plan"). Yes, some are administered by the state, and some are federal direct. Its a large chunk of the population covered by these wasteful programs.

I do not support OBAMACARE because its a wasteful, and poorly conceived. We all will find out soon if its unconstitutional or sever-able into parts. However I do support some of the provisions (keeping children on the parents policy through 27, and others)

I don't have the stomach to watch people die without insurance, that's why I advocate for either a 50 state basic plan or a federal basic plan, including charity care. (I do give money to charity.)

I want another tier to be added so those that can pay, can still get whatever they can pay for. I accept that if we want universal care, we also want death panels, assisted suicide and some other items from the parade of horribles.

I am probably different from many of you as I also support:
legalization of many drugs
making some, perhaps most, prescription drugs over the counter
breaking drug patents so that every country pays the same price
voluntary use of birth control pills and devices (and providing for free)
encouraging end of death decision making based on logic, not emotion
hospice/comfort care at the end, instead of a mad race to spend 80% of a person lifetime health care expenses in the last few months
death panels certain procedures, will not be beneficial
no extensive medical care for persons in prison who have a life sentence with no opportunity for parole.
The average prisoner should not get better health care than the average citizen.

There are probably a half dozen other barbaric concepts that would offend liberals, conservatives as well as libertarians that I support.

The Mystery of Banking, by Murray N. Rothbard.

http://mises.org/Books/mysteryofbanking.....

Karl,

Interesting ticker as usual. I wanted to point out one issue though: The Gun Control laws to prevent blacks from getting guns and some sort of causality with black violence.

Black violence has to do with poverty and not with gun control (I can picture 90% of TF-ers cringing now about some Liberal guilt thesis). And no this is no liberal guilt thesis either, all you have to do is consider the following:

1. Is there comparable violent crime amongst middle class blacks? Such a demographic existed even 80 years ago in Harlem and other pockets in the South, Northeastern cities and Chicago, LA, etc. Poor blacks did not have the same level of deaths then bcos (a) the difference between working poor and middle class was not so great for all races, and (b) guns were actually less easily available for "market"-based reasons, and (c) no drug war.

2. Leave aside the Blacks since many folks are not objective on the group - whether angry White Conservatives or "guilty" liberals, look at comparable groups. The Irish were pretty violent in Boston, NY, and other cities where they had concentration of poor, poorly integrated Irish. Italian Americans were notoriously violent during the Prohibition Era. During that same time poor RURAL Whites also had gang violence and were notorious. And ALL of them had a bad name in the public propaganda of the day.

But, beginning the New Deal and WWII there was active involvement of the Middle Class elements of society with the poorer elements of society. You had the GI Bill which took a bunch of poor white guys and put them through college. Simultaneously you had loans made available to them, job opportunities, infrastructure that made electricity, water, transportation and housing cheap, and people who sat down with these folks and explained how loans work, how to dress and behave properly in a work environment, etc... Money was taken from the wealthy in high taxes and circulated through the economy to build infrastructure and a competent workforce leading to growth and more wealth.

But through all of this Blacks were mostly excluded. The reasons are probably fodder for a different discussion, but suffice to say they were not included in most of these social reforms taking place. And history shows that enough of them did get an exposure to these opportunities, starting with those who had served in WWII refusing to return to a second class citizenship, and which eventually led to the Civil Rights Movement and so on.

There was a clear divergence in the income levels and opportunity levels of blacks vs whites at this point. Before 1930 Blacks were 10% or so of the country's population and were probably at most 30% of the poor. But as whites progressed, Blacks remained poor, and most ended up in neighborhoods in the Big Cities that were subjected to White Flight and a loss of taxbase, and spiralled downward.

Note availability of guns or lack thereof never played into this at all. If you want to get a gun for criminal activity, whether it is in innery city Chicago or Oslo or Peshawar Pakistan or Papua New Guinea you can usually end up getting that gun and using it. I am all for 2nd Amendement Rights, but when you have a hammer ...

Thought you might find that worth considering. The solution to Black violence in America is to integrate them into mainstream society. If it had been done with the same zeal of the 1930s New Deal-ers it would have been accomplished by now, in the last 30 years. But it was not seen that way, everybody freaks out when "racism" is mentioned, but history shows that Republicans (thanks to Goldwater and his nutty moodswings) voted strongly against the Civil Rights Act and made it their project in life to oppose every darn thing done to help Blacks whether public or private. George HW Bush, a Connecticut Yankee with very moderate establishmentarian politics voted against the Civil Rights Act, it was that ridiculous a posture back then and that has set the party on to the current mockery of common sense that it has become. Richard Nixon seems like a New Deal-er not because he was, but because America and the American RIght have become so unhinged and unmoored from reality.

America's only hope is to have the fact-based community of Republicans hiding in their country clubs to come out in the open and speak Truth to power in the American Right. Liberals cannot do that for obvious reasons, Independents get dismissed as Liberals or Closet Liberals (David Stockman, Bruce Bartlett, Paul O'Neill, the list is long). It is going to take card carrying members of the Right to do this job. Until then we continue to******the Middle Class and make War everywhere because the Damn Liberals will not let us get everything we want and it all started back in 1964 with LBJ, wait in 1961 with JFK, no no 1933 with FDR, worse it was Wilson, no Teddy Roosevelt, AHA, it was that villian Lincoln who started it all... at this rate we will end up with blaming George Washington.

Midwestman -

Although I hold no love for either Reps or Dems, I have to point out the vacuity of your statements blaming Republicans for voting against the Civil Rights Act in your penultimate paragraph. This, by itself, calls into question your entire post.

Wiki re: 1964 Civil Rights Act wrote..

By party
The original House version:[15]
Democratic Party: 152-96 (61%-39%)
Republican Party: 138-34 (80%-20%)

Cloture in the Senate:[16]
Democratic Party: 44-23 (66%–34%)
Republican Party: 27-6 (82%–18%)

The Senate version:[15]
Democratic Party: 46-21 (69%–31%)
Republican Party: 27-6 (82%–18%)

The Senate version, voted on by the House:[15]
Democratic Party: 153-91 (63%–37%)
Republican Party: 136-35 (80%–20%)

As for Healthcare reform, like it or not the system is broken. Those who hate Medicare should get on the phone with ANY insurance company and try to buy health insurance for a 70-yr old person. You may argue that bcos of Medicare it is impossible to get that in the US, so make it practical, say they are traveling to Europe. Ask for a quote for 2 grandparents (70+), their son and daughter-in-law (40+) and the grandkids 1 boy 1 girl in their teens or twenties. Look at the numbers you get.

The citizens are the insurers of last resort. If Crazy Capitalist Corporation builds a factory in your town and Job Creates 100 jobs. After 2 yrs it goes bankrupt and the bosses leave town and you find that they have been dumping toxic crap near your town's reservoir. Who's gonna clean it up? Remember the company went belly-up, where will they find the money, assuming you can find them? One way or other taxpayers end up paying for it. And no GHWBush a 1000 points of Light will not clean up the mess either.

Same with ER care, SOMEONE is paying for it always, if not through taxes (which are transparent for the most part) then through higher insurance premiums or hospital bills or doctors' bills (which are not as transparent to the average citizen level.) As long as we keep the myth going that we can live forever and noone can deny grandma of the most advanced surgery to keep her alive another 8 weeks, we will have to keep paying through our noses because we are expecting something very expensive, very very very expensive, with a very poor ROI (financiall) and that means high costs and SOMEBODY has to pay.

We need to reform the health care payment system, and like the Civil RIghts situation if 80% of those involved had put their shoulders and their grey cells to it we would have a truly Best in the World EVER Healthcare system. But they chose to politicize it, use it to stir outrage, raise money for political shenanigans and you have the expensive lump of **** that we have now. And we are only defecating more into the public square with the lawsuits and insinuations and name-calling, and guess what that will get us... Same **** different day indeed.

Einstein, insanity, yada yada yada ... everyone knows what needs to be done, but we do not want the other guy to look like he was right or that he won, so f&%k the country, drape that flag and slander away. The angrier and more outrageous you are the more attention you get and the more important a spokesman you become. Gingrich, Bachmann, Santorum, Cain, each of these suited turds were front-runners. Nevermind what it said about Romney, what does it say about the Republican party, the American Right?!!

Midwestman wrote..

Black violence has to do with poverty and not with gun control

Single parent families explain black violence. Poverty looks like the cause only because single parent families are also more likely to result in poverty.

Midwestman also misses the significance of the black separarist movement out of the 1960s. From there it's a short step to having a permanent underclass, content with its own rotten "culture", and with no interest whatsoever in emulating the middle class.

Fast forward to today, and you have Derbyshire's suggestion that whites respond to separatism in kind.

Midwestman--you are wrong on the civil rights movement. Republicans voted overwhelmingly in favor (over 80%) while Democrats were only about 60%

Government and its greed manage to destroy anything it touches. Obama is the epitome of that sickness. He has earned the name of the human wrecking ball (actually I think 'retching ball' is the more appropriate term._

What scares me are the 'new' regulations for the patent system. All this is being performed primarily so government can soak more fees out of people. After a while only the extremely rich will be able to file.

I've seen the greed first hand in pharmaceuticals. Even organizations as the National Cancer Institute are to blame. I remember one situation where capsules were created at cost of $0.12 each for a study. The manufacturer was paid $22.00/each!

Midwest - your facts are in error. What's next - a new war on poverty?

I'm surprised you didn't bring up the lines of 'social and economic justice' (communism).Poverty will be eliminated only when people get to keep the rewards of their proper labors. I have NO issue seeing the truly lazy perish.

I see these ghetto bums always complaining about how the invisible 'man' has been keeping them down. Then I look at their subsidized housing, food stamps, and the souped up and tricked out automobiles with the gold and spinning rims. Its amazing how fast they can throw what little money they have away.

I grew up in poverty in the 1960's and early 70's as a child. I know first hand. Both of my parents worked. Both parents came from families where sharecropping was the primary occupation. Both did manage to graduate high school.

We did not have these idle luxuries - every dollar was about survival and making it to the next level. Never did my parents take one dollar of governmental aid. In those days there was a stigma attached for a man that would not support his family. Now everyone wants to pretend - 'I'm ok. Your're ok.' It is obvious everyone is not OK!

These complainers permanently fail for one reason - THEY ARE STUPID. You act as if no one has ever gotten out of the ghetto or poverty by their own efforts. The ones that do succeed do so by not following the poisonous advice of people as the 'new' black panthers. Instead they have a true system of values - one that transcends every culture and has been incorporated into the heart of every champion. They realized men should only survive by the fruits of their labors - be it physical or mental.

I think this sums it up pretty nicely.

Quote:

The difference between the originally billed amount and the settlement is treated as TAXABLE 1099-C INCOME...

Only in the USSA. You will be Taxed on the money that is not stolen from you.

Hmmmmphhhh.

******************************

Quote:

The most annoying link that pro-obamacare people make is that insurance=healthcare.

Exactly. Medical insurance companies are in the business of making money - NOT providing medical care. Forget that at your peril.

We'll be even more screwed up in this way with Obamacare, because it forces a whole bunch of new customers to the insurance companies. It's gonna become a neverending round of claims denied, and fat-cat ins. co. executives living large off the proceeds of denied care. Like now, in spades. What a gravy train for those jerks. What a sellout by our .gov.