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Banned
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Originally Posted by Mojo_PeiPei
I think the insurance pricing has more to do with ridiculous law suits and such, that is the shit that drives up the premiums.
Also oral health and dentistry is ridiculous. Are you telling me that $20 worth of metal in my mouth and a few 20 minute check ups annually were worth thousands of dollars to correct my janky teeth? The government would be smart to regulate the shit rather than making it mandatory.
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Mojo, I am close to starting a thread that is designed to spark curiousity as to why some of the opinions of posters here bear an uncanny resemblance to the opinions that the nine foundations who are listed as primary funders of the manhattan institute, and almost every other conservative think tank and opinion distributing "presence", in the US today, pay huge amounts of money to promote so widely.
I also want to examine why it is that other posters here almost never offer opinions "in synch" with those financially backed by Coors, Koch, Olin, Scaife, et al, foundations. I think it is more than a coincidence, don't you?
Let us examine who the leading critic of medical malpractice litigation, and malpractice plaintiff attorneys is, and where his funding comes from. Wouldn't you expect it to come largely from medical malpractice insurers and medical practitioners who pay the insurance premiums? I would, but that is not where Walter Olson's funding is coming from, is it?
Note how often manhattan institute "fellow", Walter Olson's name appears on the lsit here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort_re...ted_references
Examine the funding....from just nine "grantors" to the manhattan institute, at the next two links:
http://www.mediatransparency.org/rec...ecipientID=198
http://www.corpreform.com/2003/11/the_manhattan_i.html
Walter Olson maintains several websites, designed to dominate the position that you embrace, Mojo....
Here's Walter Olson, in an article in a 2004 TFP post, cited by Ustwo, just the other day:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...=130156&page=2 (in post #47 )
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=43067
I forgot that trolling liberals got it locked 
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=43067
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
..Yet as my Manhattan Institute colleague Walter Olson has documented in the Wall Street Journal and on his website overlawyered.com, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, in a comprehensive study released last year, determined that delivery problems were not to blame for cerebral palsy in the "vast majority" of cases. Cerebral palsy is instead typically caused by factors beyond the doctor's control, such as maternal thyroid problems, genetic abnormalities, or prenatal infection. The ACOG report was peer reviewed and endorsed by, among others, the Centers for Disease Control and the United Cerebral Palsy Research and Education Foundation.
Of course, Edwards's own cases may have been legitimate, but given jurors' difficulty in making scientific determinations and the trial bar's record in this area, there is certainly reason to be suspicious. Why then, in an era in which candidates are so subject to public scrutiny, has Edwards been given such a pass?...
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In the states that have capped or legislated interference in malpractice lawsuits, the record indicates premium charges for practitioners, did not decline, compared to premiums in unregulated states:
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http://www.boston.com/business/globe...awsuit_awards/
Rising doctors' premiums not due to lawsuit awards
Study suggests insurers raise rates to make up for investment declines
By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff | June 1, 2005
Re-igniting the medical malpractice overhaul debate, a new study by Dartmouth College researchers suggests that huge jury awards and financial settlements for injured patients have not caused the explosive increase in doctors' insurance premiums.
The researchers said a more likely explanation for the escalation is that malpractice insurance companies have raised doctors' premiums to compensate for falling investment returns.
The Dartmouth economists studied actual payments made to patients between 1991 and 2003, the results of which were published yesterday in the journal Health Affairs. Some previous studies have examined jury awards, which often are reduced after trial to comply with doctors' insurance coverage maximums or because the plaintiff settles for less money to avoid an appeal. Researchers found that payments grew an average of 4 percent annually during the years covered by the study, or 52 percent overall since 1991, but only 1.6 percent a year since 2000. The increases are roughly equivalent to the overall rise in healthcare costs, said Amitabh Chandra, lead author and an assistant professor of economics at the New Hampshire college.....
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2006 was a good year for investors, so....
The reason that malpractice litigation is demonized, and the demonization is paid for by the nine foundations is about removing a stream of money that interferes with what the nine foundations funding goals are actually about, why they would foot the bill that Insureres and Doctors would logically be paying, if this was about furthering a legitimate argument that would lead to a populist result,,,,lower medical care costs for the masses:
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http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/r.../Section1.html
.....The Funding Behind the Right-Wing Movement Organizations
Right-wing organizations in this network all receive major general operating support, project grants and coordinated strategic guidance from a core group of interlocking, ultra-conservative foundations that has been working for nearly thirty years to alter public attitudes and move the national agenda to the right. This core group of right-wing foundations includes the Scaife, Castle Rock (endowed by the Adolph Coors Foundation in 1993), Bradley, Olin and Koch foundations. (See Appendix 4)
"Five foundations stand out from the rest: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch Family foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Family foundations and the Adolph Coors Foundation. Each has helped fund a range of far-right programs, including some of the most politically charged work of the last several years."
- "Buying a Movement," People for the American Way Foundation[6]
These foundations are associated with the extreme right of the political spectrum. The Bradley Foundation's money comes from Harry[*] Bradley, a member of the John Birch Society.[7] The Coors Foundation previously financed the John Birch Society.[8] The Koch Foundations were founded by Charles and David Koch, sons of Fred Koch, founder of the John Birch Society. David Koch, the 1980 Libertarian Party Vice Presidential candidate, funds many libertarian organizations, and is co-founder of the libertarian Cato Institute.[9] William Simon of the Olin Foundation was a member of the secretive Christian-Right <h3>Council for National Policy</h3>, and chairman of an organization set up by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.[10] Richard Mellon Scaife and his foundations were the primary funders of the anti-Clinton efforts of the 1990s, which included funding the vitriolic magazine, American Spectator.[11] As for today's John Birch Society, it is currently engaged in a "Get US Out!" (of the UN) campaign, a philosophy reflected across the right-wing movement.[12]
<h3>There are now over 500 organizations, of which Heritage Foundation is the most influential, all receiving funding from this core group.</h3> A 1999 study, $1 Billion for Ideas: Conservative Think Tanks in the 1990s,[13] shows how well-funded these organizations are. The study found that the top 20 of these organizations spent over $1 billion on their ideological campaign in the 1990s, not only on tort reform, but on a number of other issues they are advancing....
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Mojo, if,
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....I think the insurance pricing has more to do with ridiculous law suits and such, that is the shit that drives up the premiums. .....
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....were the primary influence on the high cost of medical insurance and medical care, don't you think there would be a populist movement rising, from the rising number of uninsured and by increaingly burdened purchasers.... the employers providing medical benefits?
Every opinion the foundations listed above, pay for, are opinions with no populist support, because....they are anti populist....they have to be subsidized and distributed by entities cosmetically altered to appear to be populist, scholarly, authorative, trustworthy...just like.....the pentagon, ala Rendon and "the Lincoln Group", and the "Bloggers Roundtable" !
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http://www.policycounsel.org/18856/3...ession*id*val*
Grover Norquist - president, Americans for Tax Reform; president, Americans Against a National Sales Tax/VAT; national leader of the "No New Taxes" pledge for political candidates; economist and chief speechwriter, U.S. Chamber of Commerce 1983-84; economic advisor to Jonas Savimbi, UNITA; B.A. Harvard College 1974-78; Harvard Business School 1979-1981, M.B.A.
.....It has been estimated that 75 percent of the American left is government-funded, federal, state and local. When you look at who goes to their meetings, when you look at who goes to their conventions, you're talking about government workers, you're talking about labor union leadership, you're talking about coercive union dues, you're talking about the tort lawyers, the trial lawyers, who now match the labor unions in many states as the major funding source for the Democratic party.
When you have tort reform, step-by-step, a little tort reform here and a little there, in each of the fifty states, every time you do that you puncture a hole in the fundraising efforts of the Democratic Party. Every time you have a new start-up company that's non-union--and jobs are created in new companies--you reduce the flow of cash to the Democratic party.
Now, while I'm projecting a future that's cheerful and where we're doing well, let me make it very clear that we are going to have betrayals, we are going to have setbacks, we are going to have compromises. We have a weak Senate, we don't have every member of the House hard-core. But even with all of those problems, I suggest that we are methodically moving forward and crushing the left.
Even if we get sold out and get the miserable Legal Services Corporation cut 40 percent instead of eliminated, as it should be, this is what it means. It is the equivalent loss to the left as if the Democrats had come and stood in front of the Heritage Building, burned it down, shot everybody inside, walked down the street, done the same thing to the Cato Institute, then gone down to American Enterprise Institute and burned that as well, and done all that three times. That's the loss of resources which results from simply cutting Legal Services Corporation, which funds left-wing lawyers, by 40 percent.
No, we didn't get everything we wanted. I'm very unhappy we didn't kill Legal Services the first day. But if I were on the left watching those resources, in effect, go up in smoke, I would be more distraught.
I suggest that there are four fronts that the Republicans are moving forward on, in going after the left. And these are the same four fronts that also destroyed the Soviet Union......
This address was delivered to the Board of Governors of the Council for National Policy in September, 1995 in Nashville, Tennessee.....
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Mojo and Ustwo, I have no ambition or hope of influencing either of you. If I can influence some who read your posts, spur them to be curious about whether your opinions are of populist origins...voters inclined to vote in their own self interests, or whether they are part of an agenda obsessively promoted by an ultra conservative, extremely wealthy, christian evangelical directed and financed (CNP) "section" of the respublican party, I think it will improve the tone and the discussion in the threads. |