• EGYPT...

    From BOB KLAHN@1:123/140 to BOB ACKLEY on Mon Feb 14 12:15:52 2011

    ...

    The US Postal Service just announced how much more they are losing now
    due to retiree healthcare benefits they are now paying in advance.

    These people have absolutely no concept of insurance.

    The issue is the purpose of insurance. All else derives from
    that. Most people believe the purpose of medical insuarance is
    to insure that you get medical care when you need it.

    Shucks, I'm not an expert on the subject but I know more
    about it than Obama and his congresscrook henchmen do. Nor

    Yet all I have seen from you is "risk management". For most
    people the only risk they are concerned about managing is the
    risk they will not get medical care, or go bankrupt getting the
    care.

    am I an expert on business practices - although I do have a
    ...
    graduate level <g>) - but I know that if the government
    raises the costs of hiring or keeping employees (such as by
    raising the unemployment insurance premiums, which are a
    percentage of payroll, or raising the minimum wage level)
    that businesses aren't going to run out and hire people or
    grant raises.

    Unemployment insurance should be paid on a sales tax, not a
    payroll tax. That being said, the bill has to be paid. The
    minimum wage is still not enough to live on decently. A living
    wage must be the goal.

    Government employees, including congresscrooks and the
    executive, always assume that whatever they do will
    have no effect on the population's behavior - despite a
    century and a half of evidence that they're wrong. People
    will alter

    On the contrary, they assume it will have an effect. Their
    proble is, they don't recognize what the effect will be.
    That and trying too hard for concensus. Now it's the fear
    of the deficit that is forcing anti-deficit responses when
    stimulus is really needed.

    Some people have been known to refuse overtime, and
    sometimes just quit working for several weeks or months
    (usually they own the company and can do that), to avoid
    making 'too much money.'

    Which is rare, and irrelevant. Someone is going to do the
    overtime, someone is going to do the work. Reagan claimed
    one year he stopped making movies in January to keep from
    paying too much in taxes. Does anyone think those movies
    didn't get made with someone else? Does anyone think the
    art of the theatre was deprived of any great work?

    I remember back in the late 1960s that a fellow in my unit
    - who was independently wealthy and a real SOB of an
    attitude case - tried to refuse a (n automatic) promotion
    from E-3 to E-4 because it would cost him more in income
    taxes than he'd get from the promotion. IIRC the AF made

    Which, of course, was highly unlikely. He probably bought
    into the idea that all your income is taxed at the marginal
    rate.

    him take the stripe anyway. Obviously, he did not plan to
    make the AF a career - but a couple of years later I noted
    that a fellow with the same name and initial, now an E-5,
    was being transferred from Wakkanai, japan, to someplace in
    Europe (while I don't KNOW it was the same guy I suspect
    that it was, and he would've been on his second hitch).

    IOW, it didn't turn out to be such a bad deal after all.

    I find it both amazing and amusing that after 80 years the
    American people haven't figured
    out that they're paying ALL of their Social Security and
    Medicare "contributions" - that half that the employers are
    supposedly paying is coming out of the employee's paycheck
    just as surely as the employee's half is, the employer's
    half just doesn't show up on the pay stub or W-2.

    I am amazed that Americans haven't realized the employer
    pays all of the social security and medicare tax. The
    employer pays all taxes of any kind, as well as all other
    bills. Unless you have a money tree in your backyard, that
    is.

    as Obamacare is concerned, were I running a big insuror I'd
    give a year's notice policyholders that the company was
    abandoning the , and then do it. Little known

    Go right ahead. Other will pick it up. Every other
    industrialized country has national health care. Most use
    an insurance based system. Insurance companies still
    compete for clients under those systems, with a much lower
    overall cost.

    It works, deal with it.

    that a LOT of small insurors that marketed various
    insurance products have that market, my former employer is
    one of them.

    And that was before Obamacare. The insurance industry has
    been taken over by a few big players, and the small
    operators have been squeezed out. IOW, insurance does not
    have an effective free market.

    BOB KLAHN bob.klahn@sev.org http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn

    ... "Ho, haha, guard, turn, parry, dodge, spin, ha, whoops!!"
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  • From BOB KLAHN@1:123/140 to JEFF BINKLEY on Mon Feb 14 12:19:48 2011

    ...

    Insofar as Obamacare is concerned, were I running a big health
    insuror I'd give a year's notice
    to policyholders that the company was abandoning the market, and then BA>>do it. Little known
    factoid that a LOT of small insurors that marketed various health BA>>insurance products have
    left that market, my former employer is one of them.

    This is what the Dems and Obama want. Their entire goal is
    to collapse the private healthcare insurance industry.
    This is one reason I will not invest in an insurance
    company right now and why I invest in big pharma companies
    instead.

    Well... that's paranoid enough.

    Funny, most national health care plans in the world work on an
    insurance based system. And at a much lower cost, with medical
    care for all that matches the quality of the US.

    One of the results is a more entrepreneual society, as people
    realize they aren't going to die from untreated illness just
    because they go out and start their own business.

    That and much of Europe now has more social mobility than the US
    has. That's one of the things the US used to claim superiority
    in.

    The right is determined to collapse the entire country, and
    rebuild it in their feudal image. That's the only reasonable
    explanation for their run up of the national debt and
    destruction of the economy. And their determination to keep
    doing it.


    BOB KLAHN bob.klahn@sev.org http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn

    ... τÖÖ ┌ ┐ûÇ ┐ $εx .⌠⌠ε¢τ$ ¥ÖÜr εÿε$íg ┐τ....
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