Cantousent

Happy Halloween, everyone. I have to admit, I detest the holiday, but I know a lot of folks enjoy it. I hope you and any children you might have enjoy a nice and safe night full of scares but no real harm. As per usual, I'm going to celebrate Halloween by turning off my porch light and treating myself to a bottle or two of wine before I pass out. Cheers!

I'm going to avoid arguing the free market/socialized case for Wals' sanity. I am looking forward to see if Enoch has the time to post something later. I suspect I might regret egging him on since my gut instinct is that I'm in the minority opinion in this forum. NO biggie. Both Oro and BCW have scored points off me and it's made for a good fight. To Cal-el's point, customers don't have an obligation to be smart or informed, but they're far far better off if take the time to think before purchase. The point is, you don't turn them away for being an ignorant cad. You just have to take the extra time to explain it to them. The unfortunate result is that they don't just waste their valuable time. They also waste your time as an employee, the labor of your employer, and the time of everyone behind them in line. I think it is appropriate to make demands of customers. For example, if you go to the counter in the post office and need to fill out forms, they'll tell you to finish them to the side while they help other customers and then skip you to the front when you're done. ....But I agree entirely that both customers and providers have responsibilities.

How wonderfully condescending, Enoch. I guess another way of reading that is,

The problem, BCW, is that you don't live in isolation. The capitalist system has created our society, and you are a beneficiary of it even if you are an unwilling practicioner. I take your point about the investors not creating a company, but companies are created or expand by and large from investors. The reason the financial crisis was so worrisome is that it limited the availability of ready capitol for investment which hurts existing businesses, makes it harder to expand, and limits lending for startup businesses. As to your studies, I say that's fine. I started to say I'd looked at studies such as the ones you cite, but two of your links are entirely useless. One is blatantly partisan. I have looked at actual studies much more than heated political rhetoric on the subject, which is probably why I find the last of your links particularly funny. Nevertheless, I think the cost of health care in the US is too high. Part of the problem is that the government spends a lot of money on health care and, where the government drives out competition, prices go higher unless the government also steps in to control wages, prices, human resource distribution, and other factors. However, I'll give you a nod for the citing health care costs, but I also want to point out a counter-argument. First of all, what criteria do we use? In the US, most of our problems by and large come from behavior rather than care. Which is to say, we eat more than we should and spend a huge amount of money to overcome our bad behavior. Since we've had programs to educate folks on bad behavior in which they engage themselves nevertheless, the only thing we could do to bump up our numbers is to have the government step in to mandate behavior on a massive scale unseen so far in our country. I would rather have the freedom and then live with the outcome, personally. I was waiting for someone to mention the studies, because I find a lot of things inherent in those studies to be questionable. For example, 'fairness' is one of the criterion for judging different countries. "Fairness?" How do we define that? Does that mean that a system is less fair if someone who pays more gets better care? And why is that bad? If you can afford a better car with more safety features, you are less likely to die in a variety of vehicular accidents. Is that unfair? Should we mandate 'fairness?' If I make more money and have better quality of food, does that mean that life is unfair? Should we have 'fairness' police to make sure all people in society have the same quality of food? Conversely, what if having ready access to food leads to obesity? That's also another factor, as I mentioned above. How about infant mortality rates? "However, the method of calculating IMR often varies widely between countries, and is based on how they define a live birth and how many premature infants are born in the country. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines a live birth as any born human being who demonstrates independent signs of life, including breathing, voluntary muscle movement, or heartbeat. Many countries, however, including certain European states and Japan, only count as live births cases where an infant breathes at birth, which makes their reported IMR numbers somewhat lower and raises their rates of perinatal mortality." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality In the US, aside from counting more infants as alive at birth, we also have more personal investment in fertility treatments which leads to more borderline births in the first place. I could go on, but I think the point is that the studies putting down the US health care system don't tell the whole story. I'll concede that these studies do show room for improvement. Nevertheless, there're a lot of studies built around grinding an axe rather than finding the truth. ...But, what the hell, we're all biased. As for free market leading to corruption, I think it's far more efficient than the government and no more prone to corruption. But I don't really hate the idea of socialized health care. I just don't understand how it's any better to have a small group of unelected officials deciding my fate rather than the market. I mean, at least if I get better or worse care because of my economic condition, then the impersonal hand of the free market decides my fate rather than an arbitrary body of officials that often stands outside the normal parliamentary deliberative process.

Well, drop the other shoe, boyo. What happened to you? Didn't you get stuck in an elevator or something recently? Or a fire or something like that? I spent the whole day doing nothing. I haven't had a day to do nothing in a long time and that's what I did. Now I'm continuing to do nothing, which is really relaxing and that's something.

Frankly, I detest the DoE also, but that's a different debate. I do, however, believe in public education run by states and counties, but I believe private education is a viable option and should continue to be so. As far as the argument about consumerism, I think we should substitute a different word: competition. I don't believe that substituting non-elected bodies for personal choice makes for a better system and I seriously doubt most Americans feel much differently. What we want is to make health care affordable and available, which I believe it is to the majority of Americans already. Now, the more hard-core among you, such as Oro, might desire a complete overhaul to the system, but I don't think it needs to be so dramatically altered. What it needs is tweaks, many of them actually going more towards a free market solution. The free market is actaully excellent for providing new goods and services, driving down the costs of existing goods and services, and distributing those goods and services across a huge economic spectrum. Do I think capitalism or the free market are perfect? No. ...But I do believe that placing equality over freedom and calling efforts to level the playing field often hurt the poor and middle class far more than it hurts those greedy 'capitalists.' The system we have works. It doesn't work perfectly, but then again what system does? If you really want to claim Cuba as the great example of health care, I say go for it. I'm a big Michael Moore fan. I've watched all his most popular propaganda films. In fact, I hope he comes out with one for the next election. I'd really like to see the Republican win and Michael Moore's track record is pretty good for Republicans in election years. As far as going to the hospital, yes, separating folks from any financial consideration in going to the doctor encourages them to go more often. For that reason, some folks will go to the doctor sooner and catch things that are far more treatable early. However, you'll also get a lot more folks going for trivial things and then backing up the system. I don't advocate making folks suffer. I just don't think it helps provide better care when folks feel completely disconnected from any consideration of costs. There are costs to providing health care for people whether the government doles out the care or a system of private insurance does, and those costs work their way into the system no matter what you do. As far as the appendix thing, I just hate going to the doctor. I don't trust them, which is irrational, but I go anyway when I have to. The problem with me isn't so much a cost/benefit disincentive. Five bucks for seeing my primary physician every now and then isn't going to have much impact. The larger issue for me is that I just don't want to go. Even now, when there appears to be some legitimate health issue regarding my heart, I'm resistant to spending a lot of time at the doctors. ...But I do have to admit that I'm enough of a cheapskate that I didn't go to emergency even when I decided that I was going to have to throw in the towel, after weeks of suffering, because the cost is $100 versus $5 for urgent care or my primary. lol You know, I had to pay the five bucks at urgent care, they ran a ct and sent me by ambulance immediately to emergency. I had to pay $95 bucks to make up the difference when I got to emergency, and the ambulance cost my insurance which wouldn't have been the case if I'd just gone in to emergency the night before. Meanwhile, I end up in the hospital for five days with iv antibiotics and then go home. Insult to injury? haha My insurance company reimbursed me the whole $100 for the emergency room visit because, if it's a real emergency, the visit has no copay. When folks complain about healthcare services, I tend to agree that there are problems, but I just don't see any system that works perfectly.

Nope, just keeping the blood pumping. Trust me, my nerves are right fine in this thread. Don't be sorry. Just think harder. Do you believe, under the same circumstances, I'd go to one doctor in England and all of the sudden he's going to cure me so I don't need to see other specialists? Good God, man, you live in Fantasyland. I would have gone through by and large the same steps in any western health care system. Only here, I went through them a hell of a lot faster. The point isn't that I would go to one 'cure-all' doc in Fantasyland to do my one-stop health care shopping. The point is that there isn't a one stop shopping experience when dealing with specialties. To think otherwise isn't just naive, it's foolish. Who said anything about good? The US was, until recently, the best place to develop drugs and one of the best places to develop equipment. To be fair, the Europeans have been actually quite good about moving new medical devices through administrative bodies, and so I'll give them that. To your point, we need those greedy bastard drug companies to have incentive to develop new drugs because, at the end of the day, those altruistic third world countries couldn't get the drug unless the greedy R&D bastards develop it in the first place. Look, I'm not saying that consumerism is the holy grail. I take your point about the need for immediate care to heart. I really do. In fact, I might even share my experience about my burst appendix because that shows the good and bad of American health care. At least in my opinion and experience it does. It also shows how dangerous consumerism can be, since I waited to go to the doctor because I hate it so much and then, when I was in absolute agony I waited one. more. night to go to urgent care because it's cheaper than going to the emergency room. I understand your point. But there's also a point where, both in England and the US, we need to find some way to break the cost curve of treatment without lowering the standard. If finding a way to make people feel like they have a stake in the costs helps do that, it's not bad. EDIT: In my exhuberance, I sometimes type too fast and have mistakes. hehe Normally, I leave them, but in this thread I seem to be prone to accidently saying the opposite of what I mean due to typos. It's actually quite funny. Oh, and I mean this in all sincerity, I think it's fun arguing about this stuff. Most people I know in real life just don't care enough to trade ideas before they go to the ol' "let's agree to disagree and head out to dinner" model.

Spaghetti. You can make the sauce with or without meat. You can put in vegtables or not. You can vary the types of pasta you use. Overall, a pretty good staple. You can have a meal with the protein, carbs, and vegtables needed for a healthy diet. I can get oranges and lemons off the tree in the back yard to round it all out.

Yeah... That's the lesson to be learned. Nice insight, Orogungutan. The fact is that I payed five dollars as a copay for my first visit and, in fact, the stress test did show something he couldn't see from the first EKG. The real lesson is that there were enough abnormalities, including reversible ischemia, to warrant further testing, all of which leads to a cardiologist who may or may not tell me not to worry about anything. Frankly, I'm not worried in the first place, but the process has worked pretty well so far. The whole experience cost me five bucks and I've gotten more information from every step. I wouldn't have bothered doing it if it weren't for my wife, but having done it I can't complain about the quality of the care. You guys want to make this yet one more thread complaining about American health care, have at it. I'm not going to have a heart attack over it. Still, the idea that introducing some consumer/free market principles to the British system might actually have some benefits, which is probably why it's an issue over there right now. EDIT: Oh, and if you think that the bureaucracy is bad in the states, you should see the wait times in some of the other western countries. Which is worse, getting 'bounced around' over the period of less than a month to find out I'm not in any immediate danger or getting 'bounced around' over the period of months during which time my health gets worse because there was something wrong?

This is laughable. Whatever the health care system is in the United States, 'consumerist/free market' is not it. Now, you could make the case that the health insurance market is consumerist or free market, but you'd still be completely wrong. Having lived overseas and having family who live in England, I don't think I'd trade my health care here for what they have there. On the other hand, I have good insurance and don't have any chronic illness that will take me over the cap. In other words, I'm like the majority of Americans. Yes, there are circumstances where the British system would be damned appealing, but the vast majority of us don't live in these circumstances. It's always good to find a good unbiased source for your information. ...And if you think the AFL-CIO isn't out for itself, you're delusional. It's always interesting when folks who have benefited greatly by that greedy 'profit' complain about it as if it were the worst of all evils. Let me guess, when the auto-workers negotiate sweet contracts that carve out better pay and benefits than the vast majority of Americans, they're just getting their fair share, but when the investors who actually created the company in the first place demand a healthy return out of their investment, they're those 'greedy fat-cats?' Yeah, right. Now, as for our terrible system in the US.... I'm not a rich guy. Just an average Joe. I had some chest pain. My wife called my doctor and made an appointment for me. I went to the doctor and that day, in his office, they administered an EKG. He said there were abnormalities, but nothing that stood out but he wanted me to get a cardiolite stress test. Withing two weeks, I'd done the stress test. My doctor called me personally the next day to go over the results and said he's referring me to a cardiologist. Since I have one of those hate 'HMO' plans, I need a referal. Yep, I won't get to go to the cardiologist for an entire week. Of course, if the stress test had come out badly, then I would have seen the cardiologist already. Well.... that's cheating because I already saw a cardiologist at the stress-test because of a small abnormality in that. He cleared me to go and the reason my doctor is refering me to a cardiologist is because of that dreaded 'personal relationship' that we greedy assed Americans try to establish between patients and doctors. All of this is within a month. If you tell me I should throw over my so called 'consumer driven' health care for the British or Canadian systems, I'll laugh in your face. Sorry, Wals, I know there are many admirable things about the British system, but in most circumstances for most Americans the US system is simply better.

I loved Bloodmoney. I've considered putting it back on my computer, but then I don't get to play anything but PS:T with the wife these days anyhow and she definitely wouldn't go for the Hitman series. I go SA on every level except for that cursed one on the boat. I just simply could never get eveyone without at least a witness or two.

In keeping with what Tig said, customer service (or guest service or whatever term is in vogue right now) involves more than paying for something and then receiving it. This is true even if you're selling a widget in a warehouse store, but the dynamic is even more significant when you pay for a service and becomes increasingly integral as that service becomes more personal, such as a student/teacher or patient/doctor relationship. That is to say, most folks will choose a store where the clerk greets them with a smile and the cashier engages in some sort of friendly banter rather than a store where the staff is unfriendly. I know I know. Some contrarians among us will assert that they prefer stores where folks completely leave them alone, and there are times where I feel the exact same way, such as when I shop for cars. Nevertheless, that's also part of the dynamic. On the one hand, customers prefer service staff to be friendly. On the other hand, the provider wants to sell more product or service. A good provider, whether it's the cashier at a grocery or a nurse at the doctor's office, picks up on non-verbal and verbal cues to assess the customer and tailor his delivery accordingly. It can be something as simple as the customer approaching the cashier, the cashier smiles and says hello. If the customer gives the impression he isn't interested in banter, then the cashier is still friendly, but limits himself to questions that are necessary for the transaction. At a dealership, the salesman gauges whether or not he can break down the customer's resistance to service in order to make a sale. As long as he thinks he can push the issue, he will. When he realizes that he's actually hurting his chance to sell a car, he withdraws (and often lurks around to be ready to jump in if things change). Like Tigranes said, there's a hell of a lot involved in human interaction for any reason. For my part, I don't think there's a huge difference between how the patients see doctors in the US and Britain or in how they interact with them. I mean, in one case private insurance foots the bill for doctor visits, in the other, the state foots the bill. In reality, most insurance in the US, if I understand it correctly, is provided through employment. There might be a co-pay for services to some degree, but the interaction is not so clear cut as a private citizen going out to purchase a product from a private business. It's much more like a utility. You have limited options. Moreover, if you only pay a fraction of the amount due for any service, then you're going to be insulated from the typical consumer behavior of measuring the cost versus the benefit. That's why you hear some politicians talking about personal health care accounts. You shop more so you don't go in for every sniffle which lowers the cost while providing competition for the service. I'm not advocating anything because I don't want to turn your thread into a universal health care debate. I'm only saying that there's a lot of folks looking at stuff like this in order to improve the service while lowering the costs for society as a whole. Getting to actual customer service, which is a big part of consumerism, I think most folks I've met in government bureaucracy have actually been friendly. Even in things like military processing, once you get out of training, folks are generally pleasant. Sure, you get rude folks and the bar for customer service is undoubtedly lower most of the time, but you still get a lot of nice folks in places where the influence of outright commercialism is limited and you still get nasty folks in service oriented industries. I used to conduct a lot of customer service seminars a long time ago. in fact, of all the seminars I conducted, such as film development and prescription processing, I conducted more customer service seminars than any two or three others combined in any given month because it's the most important. I don't know how much my rambling answer helps, but that's my take at least. If we could find a way to make the patients in either the US or England feel more tied to the costs of their personal health care without reducing their vital service all the while putting more competition for service providers to lower costs and increase quality then we'd be in fine fine shape. Since we're talking about living in Fantasyland, I say we hold out for personal hoverjets also.

Does it matter if our perspectives are from a US point of view, Wals? I don't have a psych or econ background, but I have spent a lot of time in hopitals with sick people, not as much as a patient as with family and as a volunteer. I don't want to bogart your thread talking about US stuff if you're only interested in things from within the national health service.

I think baseball can use an exciting world series. I'm pulling for the Rangers myself, but it's always good to see a series to all the way to the seventh games, especially saved by an extra innings homer to keep the series alive. All that said, I think the Rangers will win when you look at all the factors. Of course, I gave the Cards a huge advantage by making a prediction. :cant's huge grin icon:

Did the Cardiolite Stress Test. Not really a bad ordeal so much as time consuming. They got me in early, though, so that was a plus. What really burns me is that I'm sure my heart is just fine. I had a couple boughts of bad chest pain, which I explained to my wife was just bad heartburn from indigestion, and she decides to call my doctor and make it a drama. Ever since I refused to go in for stomach pain until a week or so after my appendix burst a couple of years ago, she gets freaked out about stuff. I'm going to live to be a hundred and ten years old, no doubt.

So you play this game in your web browser? That just sounds weird. Not that it couldnt' be great, it's just that it seems weird to me.

Tomorrow I have to go have that stress test. It actually pisses me off. I'm sure it's just bad indigestion, but I have to go spend virtually the entire day so they can check out my heart. Really, because it's not feasible to do anything after the test, I've lost the whole day. I guess I can come chat about crap on this message board tomorrow.

We're all Sisyphos, Gorth, my old friend. It's just that the lucky ones open Pandora's box and fool themselves. :Cant's **** eating grin icon Seriously, though, I thnk most most human resources people have at least some baqckground in customer service, which should scare the hell out of my friend, Wals. ...And I still resent you being more eloquent in my native tongue than I am, Gorth, you bastard!

I haven't read those, but now that I've seen they exist, I'm likely to check them out. Lately, I've been more or less been on a real historical or 'tea party' bent. In general, I agree with 'tea party' principles, but I'm not sure if I've bought into the movement as something larger than a political movement yet. Still, my background is in ancient history and I'd like to get out of American early Republican or late colonial works and back into Roman or Greek history.

I'd been a member of human resources and, as such we had input into training and hiring. Please forgive me if I'm a tad disoriented at the moment, but I thought I'd weigh in on this issue. Often, training and other 'human resources' responsibilities are part of the same heading at large corporations. In either case, and I've done both, most of the folks really do try to help the operational staff and management do a good job. In the end, of course, it amounts to moving rocks from one pile to the other and then back again, but that's the nature of life.

Same ol' same ol'.

Yeah, FO2 had a lot of inside jokes and easter eggs. I enjoyed them well enough, but it was the sheer amount of stuff that I liked the best. It had a ton of content and way more freedom than the average game at that time.

I kind of buy into what... Zora? said earlier that the Christians and Muslims are essentially worshipping the same God, whereas the Jews have a good case for having a different God. Granted, I think all three share the same God, but I can see the argument. Really, history is rife with these sorts of distinctions. I almost said 'petty distinctions' but really distinctions are usually far less petty from an insider perspective. Anyhow, I think it's funny that canon is often established after a splinter group starts mucking up things. Not only that, but even the passage of time and the sway of political, academic, and religious opion muck things up also. Look at the Septuagint. I have read some of it in Greek but I can't read Hebrew so I'm basically at the mercy of academes to give me the straight scoop. Unfortunately, I know some of them have some major political or religious axes to grind and every one of them is biased by a school of thought. So this really significant document is alternately held up as a gold standard or dismissed throughout history. I love the conversation though. There just isn't anyone in real life who cares about this stuff enough to discuss it.

I don't understand why folks are jumping on pmp. For my part, I think it's absolutely misguided to claim that Christianity, Judaism, and Isalm are the same the religion. They are effectively different with one another sufficiently to be distinct in ways that subsets of each are not. In fact, the OED definition does not lead me to believe that these three are the same religion and I would question either the motive or the thought process of the editors otherwise. ...And, before I get accused of some sort of sectarian or extra-religious fervor, I'm not offended if folks think Roman Catholics are in some reality the same religion as Shiite Muslims. I just don't buy it. ...And I suspect that most folks don't either. It might be a PC statement, but that doesn't make it true. It is the very essence of intelligence to be able to find similarities between two discrete items and differences between two like items. If the idea is to come up with agreed definitions, then I'm all for it, but I'd rather go for truth than trickery and clever arguments that Islam and Judaism are the same relgion reek of cleverness to me.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that elves and orcs are part of the same religion even if they both believe in the actual existence of the same gods, Gorth, but I do believe they share one pantheon. Maybe it's just a classical language thing, but there isn't an elvish pantheon and an orc one. I guess it's just a definition thing, but the word pantheon is all inclusive of the gods. It's the very definition of the word. There isn't an elvish 'everygod' and an orcish 'everygod.' The elves have a subset of gods and the orcs have a subset of gods from the same pantheon. If, as I think grey said earlier, the elves denied the existence of the orc gods and the orcs denied the existence of the elvish gods, then there would be an elvish pantheon and an orcish pantheon. As far as the Abrahamic religions go, I think they are literally different religions but similarity of belief often makes for worse fighting than something completely foreign. That's especially true because similar religions often grow up in the same neighborhood and are forced to duke it out with each other long before the winner gets the chance to export the 'real truth.' I will tell you, I don't recall the last time someone personally (not meaning television or writing, but someone I know in real life) attacked my Roman Catholicism who wasn't either atheist or Protestant. I've not always been kind or even fair when arguing with Protestants either, at least when I was younger, I tend to take the longer view as I age. Anyhow, my point is that you don't feel the need for a turf war with someone who doesn't threaten your turf.