And as for you, wolfpup, the fact is that beyond the general weakness of your arguments such as they were, it became apparent after a while that you were discussing a different issue than I was. I introduced rationing in socialized medical systems as a parenthetical aside, to forestall potential objections to a point I was making about drivers of health care spending in the US, in the context of the thread’s focus on the potentialities of the new initiative. But that seems to have been a red flag to a simple-minded partisan such as yourself, who saw this as an attack on everything you hold near and dear, and you immediately climbed up on the ramparts to defend the relative deficiencies of the US system vs other systems that you prefer. Some of the things you said were silly and what wasn’t was simply misdirected at a position you imagined I was taking. It took me a while to realize that you were in the midst of a jihad against an imaginary attack, but I figured it out eventually.
But I don’t anticipate engaging you on this or any other issue, because the bottom line is that I believe you’re an idiot. Grim Render did not distinguish himself in that discussion either, as above, but I don’t think he’s an idiot.
[Minor aside: I’ve not said anywhere that I work for a for-profit insurance company - or any insurance company at all - as you asserted. That’s just something you imagined you saw. You, being you.]
Really? The “issue” I was discussing was the wrongness of your claims, specifically, your pathetic attempts to find excuses for the costs of US healthcare while assiduously ignoring the elephant in the room. Which elephant, when pointed out to you, caused you to cease further discussion. If my arguments were “weak”, you were spectacularly unsuccessful in refuting them, choosing instead to bloviated demonstrable – and demonstrated – nonsense, and thereafter indulge in sullen silence.
This is what I saw:
If I made incorrect assumptions from this, feel free to update us with the facts. I can confidently make statements about health care economics, not so much about second-guessing who your employer is. My assumptions from this statement came from the fact that the vast majority of health care actuaries are involved in the risk-rated health insurance business. They have a minimal role in community-rated public health systems. In fact, in a conference held some years ago about the potential impacts on actuaries of a hypothetical US public health insurance system, one of the industry representatives stated “our whole foundation [of the actuarial business] could get blasted away”. Kind of a vested interest there, eh, what, what, Fotheringay-Phipps?
Given his looseness for definitions, I don’t know that the standard definition for “health care actuary” is necessarily applicable to his employment.
You would think that with a “title” like that, that he would be employed in the healthcare industry, but that is just because you are using the standard definition. Given his penchant for making up his own definitions to words, he could be anything from a garbage collector to a retail worker.
wolfpup: Your understanding of the health care actuarial field is worth about as much as your understanding of the health care field generally. I don’t need to respond to what my employer is just to counter an assumption that you made up. (Though I’ve probably mentioned it on this board, at some point over the years.)
BTW, I notice in the Elon Musk thread that you’re there doing your same shtick. Discussing a subject with someone who clearly knows a lot more about it than you do, but armed with both a comforting ignorance of your own intellectual limitations and a consuming passion about the subject, you jump in and blaze away at perceived enemies.
I think Churchill once take “it’s not that it takes all types; there just are all types”. You’re a type.
I don’t need to respond to you either, but FTR, my understanding of the health care field generally is based on a lifetime of experience with single-payer in many different contexts; studying the writings of health care economists like Uwe Reinhardt; interested involvement and study of other health care systems; speaking with many doctors of their experiences; the deep experience of one of my own relatives who was instrumental in helping to establish one of the first UHC systems in Canada; and those who have moved to the US and can provide first-hand contrasting insights on what they’re experiencing there.
What’s your experience, and what’s the basis of the impartiality that should lend your opinionated partisan rants any credence whatsoever? I have no vested interest – I just observe what works. You appear to be one giant walking vested interested owned by the industry. You have clearly been bloviating complete garbage, and have exactly zero understanding of what terms like “rationing” mean, and not a glimmer of a clue about where the majority of health care costs really come from that account for the extraordinary difference between the US and the rest of the world. Seriously. You don’t have a blessed clue.
As for the actuarial field, I don’t claim to know anything much about it except in very broad generalities, but what I said and the quote comes from the record of the 1992 meeting of the Society of Actuaries on the impact of a potential national health insurance plan, so if in your esteemed opinion the Society of Actuaries is ignorant of the health actuarial field, please take it up with them, and get back to us with their reaction to your attempts to educate them. I would really enjoy that!
What you are not aware of, and probably couldn’t comprehend because you’re an arrogant, ignorant fuck, is that the poster in question and I exchanged a couple of friendly PMs in which we clarified the matter, and agreed that he was using a very narrow definition of “build” while I was focused on the overall project initiative. But I can understand how it would upset a right-wing partisan hack such as yourself that someone would consider the role of government in anything at all to be important.
^^^
Notice the famous F-P style: refuses to answer a direct question, refuses to acknowledge facts, unilaterally declares victory (after bloviating a stream of proven lies out of his rear end), and runs away. This is exactly why he got pitted originally (see OP) and why he remains just as popular today (see, for instance, here and here).
Maybe it’s like a fantasy baseball thing for him and his buddies. They trade imaginary healthcare stocks back and forth and score their week-to-week performance based on death rates by various causes. Foth took an early bet on someone falling off the back of a slow-moving train and it paid off until another player used a “Goodbye, baby” card and the whole thing unravelled.
Or maybe his actual employment involves “rationing health care” using a soup ladle, which would account for his obsession with rationing and long lines – not something actually seen in health care, but common in soup kitchens for the homeless. I believe that most right-wing fucks like F-P see soup kitchens for the homeless as an accurate analogy and portrayal of universal health care, with all its attendant “rationing” and of course “socialism”.
There is of course (according to the Wisdom of F-P) no rationing with private health insurance: all you and your employer have to do is give them vast amounts of your money (if you have it), and then if you get sick, their highly trained bureaucrats (trained to make their employers the highest possible profits) will explore all possible legal options to get out of paying for your treatment. Or they’ll find the cheapest possible alternative, and if there’s nothing in the reams of fine print, real or imagined, that lets them get out of paying the claim, they may pay for part of it, subject to deductibles and specified limits, provided you cough up the cash for the rest and fill out all the forms exactly right. According to F-P, this can be described as “people can choose whatever medical care they want without approval from bureaucrats” which he compares favorably against the scourge of unconditional full payment of socialist “rationed” health care. So it should be understood that when I refer to F-P as an ignorant lying fuck, I’m not just throwing words around loosely.
I will also note that in F-P’s peculiar vernacular, I am “an idiot”. Here it appears that “idiot” is defined as someone who considers that F-P is an uninformed, argumentative partisan hack and generally trollish annoying dumb fuck. Hence, an “idiot” is someone who is an astute judge of character, like most of the participants in this thread who share that opinion of F-P. So “idiot” coming from him means “opposite of him” and is a fine compliment, for which I thank him.
Meanwhile my direct question to him of course remains unanswered, and the facts of the case remain unaddressed, as always.
Out of the idle curiosity possessed by onlooking lurkers like me, I googled it. Apparently he is (or at least was at one point) an actuary working in benefits consulting. It doesn’t really matter either way; wolfpup assumed too hastily but was not egregiously incorrect. A health care actuary doing benefits consulting would presumably have a similar vested interest in the continued operation of a private health insurance market.
