Roger Charlton

xaus emim a hays of gaets

[Roger Charlton @anonymousmagpie]

@ngpaps And stay out

[Ben Shapiro @benshapiro]

"You're lucky we Muslims in here are nice, because if we weren't, our co-religionists outside would burn you to death" isn't an amazing argument

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

I’m sick to my stomach…

This is going to prevent so many women and people of color from getting cheap groceries.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

Mr. Sanders appears to believe that if enough people desire another man's property, the desire itself ripens into a right. This is a curious doctrine, for it would imply that theft ceases to be theft once it becomes sufficiently popular.

The founders, being old-fashioned men, held the opposite view. They supposed that rights existed specifically to protect the minority from the appetites of the majority.

If 69% support taking a 50% ownership stake in AI companies, would 69% also be justified in taking 50% of farms, newspapers, bookstores, or Bernie Sanders' own royalties?

If not, then popularity is not the principle. Envy is.

[Anthony DiGiorgio, DO, MHA @DrDiGiorgio]

Functioning markets are the best defense against a full government takeover of healthcare.

In a competitive insurance market, doctors could negotiate with multiple companies. One insurer might offer higher reimbursement but impose more paperwork. Another might pay less but make it easier to care for patients. Physicians could weigh those tradeoffs and decide which contracts were worthwhile.

Insurers would also have to compete for patients. The company that found a better combination of premiums, physician payment, administrative burden, network adequacy, and access to care could offer a more attractive product and earn more profit.

That profit would not be evidence of exploitation. It would be the reward for discovering a better way to organize care.

There would not be one perfect insurance model for everyone. Different patients and physicians would choose different combinations based on their own needs and preferences.

Most importantly, both doctors and patients would retain the ability to say no.

Doctors could refuse contracts with insurers that were too stingy or too bureaucratic. Patients could leave insurers with inadequate networks, excessive denials, or poor service. The credible ability to walk away is what disciplines every participant in a functioning market.

Government systems work differently. When the government sets the payment rate and writes the administrative rules there is no meaningful alternative. If a government agency cuts physician reimbursement while tripling the paperwork, doctors cannot negotiate.

They can comply, stop practicing, or leave the system.

Markets emphasize choice. Government emphasizes uniformity and compliance. That is why I prefer markets.

But I will readily admit that our current healthcare markets often do not function as they should.

The resulting frustration is real. It is also what drives support for even more government control.

That is why defending markets cannot mean defending the status quo. We need markets that actually work, with meaningful competition and genuine freedom for patients and physicians to choose.

If markets continue to offer people only the illusion of choice, we should not be surprised when voters decide that government control cannot be much worse.

[Roger Charlton @anonymousmagpie]

@nepselaksen @Wxsdmx @Bert_VdA @fifamedia @FIFAcom no they didn't, watch the replay. none of them go to the ref.

[Anthony DiGiorgio, DO, MHA @DrDiGiorgio]

I’ve seen a hospital charge 30x more for an MRI over an independent imaging center.

That’s not a typo. 30 times higher.

CMS is spot on with this new rule.

[Sanat Dixit MD FACS @sdixitmd]

The ACA was projected to save $120B from the federal budget deficit from 2010-2019. Healthcare related deficit spending actually INCREASED by over $440B over that same 10 year period, and almost doubled over the subsequent 5 years.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

A Brown professor gave his students a take-home midterm exam. After suspecting many cheated using AI, he made the final in-person. The orange dots are the midterm scores and the gray dots are the final scores. Looks like all but 3 cheated on the midterm.

[Association of American Physicians & Surgeons @AAPSonline]

@DrDiGiorgio The administrative cost fallacy seems to never go away! Here's our debunking of these misleading claim from 2003.

[Anthony DiGiorgio, DO, MHA @DrDiGiorgio]

One of the worst takes in US healthcare policy discussions is: "Medicare has low administrative costs."

Medicare has narrowly measured administrative costs, unusually expensive beneficiaries, and a large hidden bureaucracy that is offloaded to entities outside of CMS.

First, Medicare beneficiaries are older and sicker than the average privately insured person, so Medicare spends far more in medical claims per enrollee. When administrative costs are presented as a percentage of total spending, a program that pays very large medical bills will naturally look administratively leaner.

Second, Medicare offloads collection of premiums to other branches of the government. Where a private insurance company has to spend money on premium collection, Medicare relies on the IRS to collect the taxes to pay for its services. No cost to CMS there.

Additionally, Medicare offloads the work of describing and valuing the billing units for physicians. Much of this happens through the CPT and RUC machinery, maintained outside CMS by the AMA and specialty societies. There are millions of dollars worth of time from physicians and staff for which Medicare never pays. Meanwhile, private insurance companies are responsible for negotiating their own distinct contracts with numerous provider groups.

Then the compliance costs. Doctors and hosptials spend billions of dollars on quality metric reporting, conditions of participation, joint commission compliance, and other regulations.

There is also a deeper point: low administrative spending is not automatically good. A trillion-dollar public program needs oversight. CMS loses billions to waste, fraud, and abuse every year. Some more administration to reel that in might be helpful.

Learn more in my latest, link below:

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

Incredible Egyptian goal is disallowed because of a foul far away, then same situation a few minutes later and goal for Argentina not disallowed! No VAR, nothing? FIFA again looks like a corrupt joke, playing favorites for stars.

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

The moment you realize those old stunning, impossible looking oil paintings of sailing ships in storms were absolutely accurate.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

What happened to my bank account? Absolutely nothing.

You believed a lie.

You believed a lie that was told to you by your political class, and your news media, to keep you from asking uncomfortable questions about how much you are paying in tax, where that money is going, and what quality of care you actually receive for the portion of it they didn't steal.

Don't believe me? Look at the pictures.

Look.

At.

Them.

That's my wife, @acrobatichobbit. Before and after.

That's a five centimeter mass. Stage 4 metastatic melanoma. The worst kind of cancer, the most vicious form of assassin your own body can betray you with. That bright area? Blood.

Ten years ago, anywhere in the world, the scan on the left is a death sentence... an endless gauntlet of painful surgeries, followed by chemotherapy, hair loss, uncontrolled vomiting, wasting away to nothing, death.

In America, today, it's not.

We have things here. Genetic therapies. Tailored viruses that attack tumor cells. Drugs that highlight cancers for your immune system, drag them kicking and screaming into the spotlight to be killed.

I won't tell you about her exact course of treatment, because that's none of your goddamned business, but I will tell you that it cost American drug companies and medical researchers a fortune to discover.

A fortune that your nation cannot afford because you chose socialism instead of progress. And socialism, however fine-sounding in theory, simply does not work.

Were she and I British, living in Britain, relying on the National Health Service, I would be a widower now.

Did saving her cost a ruinous amount of money?

Yes. This technology was expensive to create, and the people who did so deserve to pay their mortgages and feed their kids. So do the oncologists and surgeons.

Many of the men who cared for her were old men, experienced men, long past retirement age, still working because when your profession is clawing souls back from the void, sitting on a beach with a pina colada instead just doesn't hit the same.

They deserve every cent.

Did saving her cost a ruinous amount of money?

Yes.

Did I pay it?

No.

Because believe it or not, when things are ruinously expensive, but vitally necessary, we here in America come up with ways to deal with that.

Ways that don't involve creating a big pot of money and entrusting it to corrupt slimeballs.

We have insurance. And sometimes insurance isn't cheap, but the bite it takes is a hell of a lot less of what we have than the tax man takes from you.

And insurance companies sometimes have to make hard decisions about which spending choices will save the most people. I know about this in detail, because that is my wife's profession. She creates the mathematical models that pay for all this stuff.

The insurance that saved her is the exact same plan that she provides to others.

And at the end of an awful year and a half of treatment, awful because cancer medicines make you far sicker than the cancer itself...

We were left whole.

Battered and wounded in spirit, but financially whole, at least.

The only loss we took was the blow to my career as a novelist, because it turns out you can't write stories while your wife is dying, and you don't automatically recover that ability afterwards. Not right away.

I wondered every day if she was going to live or die. I wondered every day what the hell I was going to with myself without her.

But I never wondered, not for a moment, how the hell we were going to pay for all this.

Your government doesn't solve the problem. It is the problem.

They lie to you.

[𝕊𝕠𝕝𝕒 ℂ𝕙𝕒𝕕 🎚️ @sola_chad]

“I did 1200 abortions, first and second trimester. 1 was for rape, 2 were for incest, 9 or 10 were for genetic effects … and all the rest of them were healthy moms and healthy kids.”

-Anthony Levatino, former abortion doctor

[OldTimeHardball @OleTimeHardball]

Norm Macdonald - “Patton Oswalt said he thought the worst part of the Cosby thing was the hypocrisy…. I disagree.”

Jerry Seinfeld - “You disagree?”

Norm Macdonald - “Yeah…. I think it was the r*ping.”

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

@james_mtc @voxmedia I go into greater detail as to why higher middle-class taxes are likely necessary for social democracy (let alone, democratic socialism) here: https://t.co/cSG3Vn6nbr

[Anthony DiGiorgio, DO, MHA @DrDiGiorgio]

But... but... they have universal healthcare!

[Ron DeSantis @RonDeSantis]

Compare Calvin Coolidge on America’s 150th anniversary:

“It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers."