It might be amusing to learn what qualification you think you have. I know little about you. You’re a right-wing blowhard who’s admitted to no interest in real debate — you just enjoy farting on the sidelines. I’ve assumed you were a particularly pompous blowhard but, since I don’t recall ever reading anything intelligible from you I confess that the impression of pomposity might be just due to your user name.
Since wolfpup’s little finger has forgotten more about science and technology than you could ever know, even in your wildest wet-dream, the comments in the post I quoted are inanely incorrect. Maybe we need to bump the thread Nominations for Stupidest Doper.
Now, look what you went and done! Hurt a Texan’s feelings! All vulnerable people, easily injured by a harsh word, and** FP**'s gotta unleash his sarcasm, sharp as a hammer! Haven’t you noticed how shy and withdrawn they are, like Canadians only more delicate?
You should buy him a bottle of lilac water, it would be a nice gesture.
I’ll buck the trend and say that you once gave me good advice on my HVAC system replacement, and another time put some effort into real estate investment advice, and that was nice of you. While I’ve found some of your posts obnoxious (and obviously disagree on lots of things), I don’t recall instances of outright dishonesty, disingenuousness, bigotry, or outright trolling, unlike, say, the target of this thread.
But watching the insult-competitions from the sidelines can be amusing, so please carry on!
I don’t want to hijack the well-deserved HD pitting, but if it’s your impression that Fotheringay-Phipps hasn’t been outright dishonest, disingenuous, and all those other things, then I invite you to browse his very own dedicated pit thread in which I was pleased to make a number of contributions, and in which you’ll find broad participation from many different posters. I revived that old thread in order to pit him for exactly that kind of dishonesty in a health care discussion, in which he … well, let me quote another poster who succinctly sums it up:
He was sprouting right wing blog myths and using imaginary terminology. When this was pointed out to him, he refused to take that onboard, and instead chose to continue. His response to peer-reviewed papers is to quibble, and he never brings any arguments or cites of his own. Hes not fighting ignorance, he is on the other side of that battle … he seems to have an inability to admit that he is wrong combined with a tendency to argue from a large base of ignorance. Its not a pleasant combination. https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=20775438&postcount=116
After ignoring all the facts, and making unintentionally funny pronouncements like declaring that with private insurance “people can choose whatever medical care they want without approval from bureaucrats” – which makes you wonder what all those insurance company bureaucrats scrutinizing and denying claims are for, unlike the scourge of single-payer where full payment is always unconditional and claims are never adjudicated at all! – he then announces his intention of refusing further discussion, because the issue is apparently settled. Oh, and that was after linking to an article to support his claim about health care “rationing” which discusses a completely different concept than the one we were talking about, thus proving only the rather irrelevant fact that many words have more than one meaning.
This reminds me of another poster linking to an F-P thread with the comment “This thread was really one of the most astounding things I have read on this board”. It’s about a magician at a birthday party and show us that F-P is able to be dishonest and disingenuous on a wide range of topics, not just health care or the benefits of torturing prisoners. One of the remarkable things about that thread, as I pointed out here, is F-P informing us that he knows things, absolutely and for certain, and therefore naturally has no patience for those who argue with him. And then four posts later he also informs us that he absolutely hates arrogant people who think they know things, absolutely and for certain, and “can’t bring themselves to accept that there’s other knowledge out there that they don’t possess”. It’s quite breathtaking, really, the logic of it all.
It’s that priceless mix of attitude, complete absence of self-awareness, extreme bias, and lack of knowledge on subjects like health care, that make discussions with F-P on most subjects such a joy. But perhaps he does know something about air conditioning. Whatever he thinks he knows, I wouldn’t argue with him about it.
I stand by my position in that health care thread, while your own performance was a combination of weaseling and strawmanning.
This is simply dishonest, and is thus in keeping with your approach and character.
What’s extraordinarily arrogant is for people who were not present at an event to inform a witness to that event that things that he saw with his own eyes could not possibly have happened based solely on the fact that they can’t imagine how it could have been possible. What’s not arrogant is for the guy who was there to insist that what he saw is what he saw.
What’s dishonest is for someone else to come along and misrepresent this exchange for their own purposes. Which is naturally why someone like yourself would do precisely that.
With apologies to all for the hijack, but this in particular merits a response, because it’s an excellent illustration of just how dishonest and uninformed you are. There is no defense of the statement “people can choose whatever medical care they want without approval from bureaucrats” in reference to private health insurance. None. It’s the exact opposite of the truth. It’s a blatant lie, and I suspect it reflects in you both of those character traits: dishonesty in misrepresenting the alleged virtues of private insurance, and willful ignorance of how single-payer works.
Perhaps you’d care to tell us what all those insurance company bureaucrats are for, the ones who zealously scrutinize claims, knock down the payment amounts, or deny payment altogether.
Perhaps you’d care to explain a phenomenon in health care economics called Reinhardt’s irony, described in these quotes, emphasis added by me:
It is Reinhardt’s assertion that the absence in the United States of an overall program of budgetary control over medical expenditures, as is characteristic of the prominent European systems, results in unparalleled micro-management at the clinical level to achieve cost control unattainable on a larger scale. He writes that “…if the bureaucrats cannot somehow impose upon the healers an overall budget constraint ex ante, then they will sooner or later be driven to control their outlays on an ongoing basis, by monitoring each and every transaction for which they pay—that is, by second guessing both the providers’ clinical and pricing decisions” (Reinhardt, 1988). This appropriation of the clinical dimension of autonomy would be regarded as intolerable by physicians in other medical care systems. He suggests that “European and Canadian physicians would be appalled at the numerous intrusions into clinical decisions now routinely made by these external monitors in the United States. They probably would rise up in arms over that loss in clinical autonomy” (Reinhardt, 1988).
In contrast to the United States, France, Germany, and Canada have virtually no government or payer intrusion in clinical practice. This observation supports what may be called “Reinhardt’s irony”:
[INDENT]The less tightly society controls the overall capacity of its health system and the economic freedom of its providers to practice as they see fit and to price their services as they see fit, the more direct appears to be the private or public payer’s intrusion directly into the doctor-patient relationship-the less clinical freedom at the level of treatment will payers grant providers. https://www.nyu.edu/projects/rodwin/payment.html[/INDENT]
What’s remarkable, though, is that the statement is pretty well known to be true.
The private insurers in the US have far less control over utilization than the governments in socialist systems. Anyone who is even slightly familiar with these matters knows this. The fact that you would deny this is the partially the result of ignorance other than your cherry-picked sources and partly the result of your passion about your agenda. Either way, it does not make you a positive presence. More below.
This is a good example of your cherry-picking and lingo-driven approach. If you google “Reinhardt’s irony”, two of the first cites are to your very post. The entire internet appears to contain perhaps 20 references to the concept. So it’s not as if you’re talking about some well accepted principle, as your post would suggest. So you managed to dig up some (30 year old) position by one guy. Great for people who don’t know better and are impressed with the fancy term. But not a valid approach.
By contrast, the facts I noted in the other thread are on much more solid ground. (The sources were actually cites from my opponents, so it’s not like I was cherry picking anything.) Some examples:
This was all pointed out in the other thread. Naturally you had no substantive response to any of this, because your entire MO is about name-dropping (as you do here), misdirection, and all-purpose frothing at the mouth.
Only thing to say is that clearly Fotheringay-Phipps really does not like if someone has the background and experience to counter what he says about Salvadorans asking for Asylum, according to him a Salvadoran that knows about the issue has less of a reason to complain about.
Not surprising that the “experts” many conservatives (including the Mango Mussolini president) consults for their pompous ponderings are anything but the experts they are supposed to ask for advice.
Wow, the lies, misdirection, and weasel words just keep coming!
First of all, just to get it out of the way, do you think private insurers don’t do the same kinds of cost/benefit analyses with a view to their profit margins, and with far less consideration (actually, none) for the well-being of the patient? Why, yes, yes they do – do we fucking really need to debate this? :
According to a recent consumer survey, the health of as many as 53 million insured Americans may be in jeopardy from insurance companies that refuse to cover treatments for chronic or persistent illnesses …
… [The the Doctor-Patient Rights Project] showed an alarmingly high rate of denial — 24 percent, nearly one in four — among consumers treating chronic or persistent illnesses. Additionally, in 70 percent of those cases, the denied treatment was for an illness or condition described as “serious.” Up to 43 percent of the individuals denied care described themselves as “in poor health.”
… Even when insurance companies eventually approved treatment, the authorization process itself delayed effective treatment for months for many consumers. The burdensome paperwork also contributes to an estimated $471 billion annually in billing and insurance-related administrative costs, regardless of the final outcome.
That’s your lie #1.
Lie #2 is somehow pretending that “mumble mumble … less control over utilization … mumble” equates to the allegedly “well-known” truth of the utterly absurd bullshit “people can choose whatever medical care they want without approval from bureaucrats”. Bureaucracy meddling in the doctor-patient relationship is absolutely central to how private health insurance works. I don’t give a flying fuck how many occurrences of “Reinhardt’s irony” you found or didn’t find on the Internet, the concept is absolutely fundamental and indisputable – I note you did not and of course cannot dispute the actual facts in those quotes.
You conveniently didn’t answer my question: what do all these thousands of claims-adjusting bureaucrats working for insurance companies do? They adjust and deny claims, that’s what. It’s the centerpiece of all private insurance (and all insurance, really, except single-payer and closely aligned health payment systems, where it doesn’t exist). Every single American I’ve ever spoken with, including my own family living down there now as US citizens, have stories about it. I live in Canada, and I’ve never even seen a health care claim. The idea of a claim being “denied” is a non-existent concept. Because there is no self-serving insurance company bureaucrat between me and my doctor. It’s just that simple. Everything else is lying and misdirection and perhaps even some amount of honest misunderstanding on your part.
I’ve lived under this system for most of a long life. I’ve been a patient advocate for the elderly. I’ve never seen evidence of “rationing” or economizing that deprived anyone of the very best health care, ever. I can even make a first-hand observation from a Canadian perspective about the quote alleging that coronary artery surgery is performed in the NHS at rates 77 percent lower than the United States in 2002. I can’t comment on the NHS specifically because I don’t know enough about it or their particular funding model and priorities, but from the perspective of single-payer public health care, when I had a mild heart attack, coronary bypass surgery was the default recommendation, no questions about claims approval, no hesitation, bam, that was the path they were on. I had to fight them off and demand a more creative solution, which turned out to be an innovative form of robotic percutaneous coronary intervention, a form of stenting. Again, nothing about claims or payment or eligibility ever entered into it, it was strictly a medical decision between me, the cardiac surgeon, and the doctors in the catheter lab. I hope you learned something and might dial back the bullshit a bit, but as Upton Sinclair said, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.
I never meant this health care digression to become this protracted. I was just pointing out F-P’s basic dishonesty (and/or confusion or indoctrination by his industry, who knows). Bashing HurricaneDitka is a worthy cause that shouldn’t be hijacked, inasmuch as he considers himself too good to come into the Pit to defend himself and prefers to hide behind the rules and the guise of civility, all while being a lying sanctimonious fuck.
No hard feelings. What were we supposed to do otherwise? Write “HurricaneDitka is a feckless cunt” on the blackboard twenty times?
Kudos to Fotheringay-Phipps who had the gumption to post his views, right or wrong, for Dopers to peruse. This is in contrast to some of the Board’s right-wingers who can do no more than, like a drunk at a MAGA rally, fart razzberries from the sidelines.
One would think a guy who can’t understand a simple post would refrain from advertising that fact. But I genuinely think you’re too stupid to appreciate that, and that you really think you’re onto something here.
I’m unclear on what the difference is between your lie #1 and lie #2. Regardless, what you’re writing is stupid and misses the point. Your claim about “thousands of claims-adjusting bureaucrats working for insurance companies” is just empty bluster on your part. Bottom line is that the numbers show that these “thousands of claims-adjusting bureaucrats working for insurance companies” are not producing lower rates of utilization for these insurance companies - to the contrary. You’re trying to cover with bluster the fact that the numbers show that you’re wrong, as shown above.
Your cite to people being denied coverage under the US system misses the point, because it doesn’t relate to a comparison of the US vs other systems. Again, the bottom line is that the numbers show higher utilization for the US, not lower. Your cite doesn’t contradict that.
I didn’t make any claims about Canada specifically, so my cite to NHS is on point.
Past that, you have nothing to your claim other than your own anecdotal experience, just shouted very loudly. I know many many people who have lived in both Canada and the US, including many with dual citizenship who spend time in both countries. And the story from all these people (at least the ones I’ve spoken to about the topic) are consistent. Canada is great in financial terms, but tough in terms of getting service. You’re very passionate about the Canadian system, so you’re dissembling about the subject.
Personally I think it’s a worthwhile digression.
It’s ironic that you (and others) bash HD for not coming into the Pit, when he shows a lot more guts just for participating in this MB than sniveling worms like yourself could ever dream of. HD knows upfront that by simply stating his views on this MB he is guaranteed of being befouled by human sewage like you and your ilk, but he takes it on. Meanwhile, gutless cowards like yourself show up with the certainty that likeminded internet punks will have your back, and you can fire away at people like HD from behind your protective scum cocoon. It would be a sight to see you take the approach - both in terms of your poor reasoning and twisting facts, and well as your hostile attitude - on an ideologically neutral MB (not to mention a RW mirror of this one), but I imagine you would never dare. Oh well.
