In an attempt to get this worthy thread back on track:
Since his views include praise for the Oklahoma City bomber and consistent toleration of white supremacism and sexual assault/harassment, he shouldn’t be surprised if he’s “befouled” for expressing them.
:sniff:
(Leaving aside the accuracy of this characterization) I’m sure he’s not surprised. That’s exactly my point. So for two-bit punks like wolfpup et al to point to HD not participating in threads like this is ironic.
Leaving aside the accuracy of your characterization of wolfpup, it doesn’t seem ironic to me if a hateful and cowardly poster is called out for his hatefulness and cowardice.
We obviously disagree on what counts as “cowardly”. My point is that using that term for a guy who knowingly exposes himself to the predictable attacks such as this thread empties the term of any real meaning.
THIS JUST IN: Poster who made the single most idiotic objection in the history of the board, calls other people idiotic.
Yes, we disagree. It should be noted we’re just talking about internet personas, which may or may not have anything to do with someone’s actual personality and character. It’s entirely possible that people who “hate” each other online might get along fine in person. By his internet persona on this board, I expect HD rather enjoys these attacks (from a class of people he appears to have great contempt for), as well as pretending to stay above them – which strikes me as cowardly as far as internetting goes.
[Moderating]
Don’t call other posters “cunts”. No warning issued.
[/Moderating]
This has now become so amusing that it’s no longer a health care discussion at all, it’s more of an entertaining exercise in watching F-P desperately flailing about like a cornered rat, except a rat in possession of smokescreens and tricks of misdirection. I do think “rat” is a good metaphor, though, because it’s appropriately representative of anyone who so blatantly and dishonestly shills for the parasitic health insurance industry.
Let’s remember that this started with a stellar example of F-P blatantly lying by claiming that with private insurance, “people can choose whatever medical care they want without approval from bureaucrats”, which is of course the dramatic and exact opposite of the truth. He accuses me of a “cherry-picking and lingo-driven approach” but then goes on about “utilization rates” as if that somehow contradicts the fundamental and indisputable fact that private insurance maintains a vast bureaucracy for the sole purpose of reviewing and denying claims, basically inserting insurance bureaucrats between doctor and patient, whereas single-payer has no such bureaucratic layer at all. Claims are just paid, period. There is no bureaucracy between doctor and patient. This is clear, foundational, and extremely important. Whereas claims denials and the bureaucracy around claims processing is foundational to private insurance – an intrinsic failing that is always present when health insurance is operated as a business rather than a public service.
But F-P is not interested in discussing what all those “thousands of claims-adjusting bureaucrats working for insurance companies” are doing, because this is just “empty bluster” (hint: what the claims adjusters are doing is adjusting claims! And many of them are denied: see my post #334). Instead he wants to talk about “higher utilization”. OK, let’s do that.
Here’s the first clue (emphasis mine):
Waste is caused by factors such as health insurance and medical uncertainties that encourage the production of inefficient and low-value services … none of the health care system’s players have strong incentives to economize … Insurance and medical uncertainties muffle price competition and, in our litigious climate, promote overscreening and overtreatment.
Over-utilization in the private insurance system is a problem, not a feature. The “utilization” argument is a smokescreen – a deceptive artifice – to avoid having to confront this obvious and intrinsic failing that is always present when health insurance is operated as a business rather than a public service. In actual fact, in comparing Canada and the US, utilization is actually higher in Canada for disadvantaged subgroups and about the same, or sometimes higher in the US, for high-income groups – but virtually all of that utilization is on minor and often redundant and wasteful matters like unnecessary testing, often from mercenary motivations. Serious conditions, especially chronic ones, are routinely subject to claims denials under private insurance, as noted by my previous link.
IOW, you get higher utilization on trivia but are always at risk of being denied the important, even lifesaving, stuff. This is all supported by the statistical facts: the appalling record of claims denials (like my previous cite), that significantly more Americans than Canadians are in poor states of health, that American life expectancy is lower and infant mortality rates higher, while for those who do get treatment for serious ailments, outcomes are generally about the same in the two countries despite a tendency for higher utilization of mostly unnecessary peripheral services.
Being that practically half the family and many friends and associates are dual citizens I suspect I know many more of them than you do, and that’s not ever been the story that I got from any of them. It’s always lamenting the incredible paperwork, arguments with insurers, cost, and occasional claims denials or drug or treatment substitutions of the health care they get in the US.
Canada is not only great in financial terms, it’s great in the very important attribute of not having a mercenary insurance bureaucrat intruding between patient and doctor. Clinical decisions are made on medical grounds, period. Lord only knows what I would have had to go through if insurance had been meddling in my cardiac case. I didn’t want bypass surgery because it was so major and intrusive and recovery so prolonged, and as I understood it there was a meeting between surgeons in different areas to see if there was a consensus on an alternative. The last thing on earth anyone needed was a fucking insurance bureaucrat saying “no” to bypass surgery because there was a cheaper alternative, or arbitrarily saying “no” to a new form of PCI because it was too new for their taste. Anyone with a shred of intelligence and decency understands that medical decisions must be strictly medical, with only the benefit of the patient in mind. Sadly, this does not describe you.
As for “tough in terms of getting service”, yeah, you and Fox News love that line. It’s true that one typically has to wait for most purely elective procedures, from considerations of efficient resource utilization (it’s called queuing theory). But when my cardiologist came into my room to tell me that the doctors had decided that in my case a particular form of PCI would be a viable alternative to bypass surgery, I asked when this could be done. His answer, “they’ll take you down in about two hours. You’ll be home tomorrow.” Yeah, it was “tough getting service”.
Until you find what happens besides anecdotes.
And are confronted with people or groups that do know about the issue.
All that, after Fotheringay-Phipps complained that people like wolfpup uses anecdotes and then Fotheringay-Phipps has to rely on them, and in a nebulous way)
wolfpup I see you have a lot of time on your hands, and you take a lot of time getting to the point of admitting that I was correct in all my claims. Understood that you’re trying to bury this under a barrage of verbiage, but still. Do you have a job?
This is the first example. After a lot of longwinded gasbagging, you’re gotten around to admitting that utilization is higher in the US than Canada, despite the insurance villains etc.
What you’re now falling back on is that it’s (for whatever reason) not the important stuff but the unimportant stuff. OK, let’s assume that’s completely true. Problem for you here is that this does not contradict anything I’ve said in this thread or in the prior one.
My posts on the subject are available and anyone with integrity - a category which strongly excludes wolfpup - will see that there’s nothing there about which type of utilization is more or less important (or more generally about which system is better altogether). The context of my posts was about whether the new Amazon etc. effort would be successful in controlling costs, and my comment was that the US system promoted high utilization, which would hamper this. There is not the slightest indication in any of this as to whether that utilization was a good idea or not.
Unfortunately, what you sometimes get around here is people who are long on intense passion and short on both intelligence and integrity - like wolfpup, in short - who seize on any perceived threat to their beloved Cause and leap into battle. But the facts are what they are, nonetheless.
So once again, you agree with my claim, though with your typical dishonesty are pretending to do otherwise.
wolfpup, you’ve been on a smackdown streak lately; keep up the good work, brother!
I wish there was a way to do the equivalent of filming David Hasselhoff when he was drunk and then having him watch the video later when he was sober with someone like F-P and their posting.
It would be great to see his face as he realized how baseless his arguments were (when there were any present), how omnipresent the insults and attempts at belittlement and how badly he comes across.
Sadly, I fear that his condition precludes any such self-awareness and this will most likely just remain a pleasant fantasy of mine.
Gee, I thought what I showed was that the “higher utilization” claim was calculated, manipulative deception by lying industry shills like yourself; that it pertained to useless trivia that produced no results; that it pertained to a problem that health care economists are trying to solve; that the victims of private insurance are subject to endless bureaucracy and denial of real and vital health care; and that this bureaucracy is intrinsic to private insurance.
So in claiming that “people can choose whatever medical care they want without approval from bureaucrats” you have been shown to be a mendacious, manipulative, lying sack of shit with no apparent principles whatsoever. People are dying from denial of health care and you’re having fun claiming that you won teh internets because the US private insurance system really does have wasteful useless over-utilization, and therefore must be Da Bomb! You are truly a reprehensible piece of work. And your obvious lack of knowledge and dishonesty is both clear and appalling.
If you add in the part that you lopped off from what I actually said, which was my actual point, it’s obvious to any sane person that I’m directly contradicting your claim and showing it to be the usual shilling and stupidity that we’ve come to expect from you.
Actually, I think of myself as just injecting the occasional fact or two and then watching Fotheringay-Phipps entangle himself in his own lies! 
This is just a lot of insults with zero substance.
To be clear, I have no issue with insults, and have been known to occasionally engage in a bit of that myself. But you’ve got to have some substance to back it up. To completely concede the substantive point and have your entire post consist of covering it up via harsh language is pathetic. Not that it doesn’t become you, though.
I repeat my earlier statement. You conceded my point entirely - and nothing “lopped off” changed that - but just covered it in verbiage and heated language. See also above.
Pot to accused kettle: “Hey, you’re black!”
Unsurprising. You’re not someone capable of understanding anything substantive. But then, that post was not directed to you.
Keep on keepin’ on, F-P, this is great. “nyuh-uh, I was right and you was wrong” repeated endlessly in the face of all evidence to the contrary is always a great winning proposition. For a moron, at least. But I’m not going to say that I was wasting my time, because I knew what I was dealing with, and my goal was to expose your fundamental dishonesty. That dishonesty has now reached an epic stage rarely seen in normal discussion, except perhaps in lunatic asylums, the only place where I imagine it’s routine to just casually ignore in-your-face reality.
It’s also apparent that, completely aside from being egregiously dishonest, you know absolutely nothing about how health care works outside of the United States, and I’ll charitably assume that if you did you wouldn’t be quite so transparently fucking stupid. No sane rational person, no matter how partisan, or what health care model they favor, actually believes your comical proposition that there isn’t intrusive bureaucracy in the private insurance system that constantly stands between doctor and patient. You’re not just a liar, you’re a pathetic one.
Yes, I guess that’s all you’ve got.
:sniff:
You even complimented me in this thread. What happened? Do you not love to hate me anymore? 
Tbh, given his habit of turning discussions into about himself, perhaps not all that surprising.