Losing an election has consequences.
Time to man up and accept that your “ilk” is in the minority, and no longer gets to dictate to the majority of Americans. We don’t like the world you want to foist on us.
The more you struggle, the less lube we will use.
Organic lube. Bio-degradeable. Reacharound negotiable.
You found one of those! Who? Where?
If that’s what you believe (and there’s nothing wrong with that, mind you), simple question for ya : why do you vote ? Assuming you do, obviously.
Bullshit.
Yeah. Republicans want to keep government out of everything possible, EXCEPT our bedrooms, our relationships, control over our own bodies, our religion, our families…
Why do I vote?
Why, to keep liberals out of office, of course. 
Seriously though, I know what you’re driving at but electing a government does not mean we are the government. And it doesn’t mean we have much more control over government than to set the general direction it takes. Most people by far disapprove of Congress and what it does. So does that mean that Congress and the laws it passes are following the will of the people? Of course not.
Why do you think so many people are so angry and why so many people oppose government health care? The country’s population is aging so you’d think there would be lots of support for it, but there isn’t. Older Americans have been around long enough to see how this country’s government operates and they want nothing to do with it calling the shots when it comes to their health care.
It is a misnomer at best and silly and naive at worst to make no distinction between us and our government. This isn’t an eighth grade social-studies class, it’s the real world; and in the real world the government is not us and it rarely does what most of us want.
But really, we are getting two different types of government conflated here. There is legislative government and there is administrative government. Administrative government is where my main gripe is concerned when it comes to governemnt health care, and administrative government where we have the least control when it comes to the voting booth. And administrative government is where the decisions would get made that directly impact our health care and what we are allowed to have. (Get that? Allowed? Being ‘allowed’ things by the government is not a good thing and it sets up all sorts of dangerous precedents. Again, I don’t want the government telling me what I’m ‘allowed’ to have. Government’s role should be to create an environment where we are free to govern our own lives and provide for ourselves, and not to take on the role of some sort of über-parent doling out allowances as it sees fit and can afford.)
Because they’re gullible dummies who listen to right-wing radio demagogues with no sense of conscience or truth?
No, seriously. When you have senior citizens waving signs that say “Keep your government off my Medicare!”, I truly can’t ascribe anything even resembling intelligence or understanding of current events to them.
Broad brush much? Both sides have their ignorant, gullible dingbats. People in this country have been resisting attempts at government health care for many, many decades. This same debate was going on in the early sixties and it was decades old then. So you can’t blame modern-day Republican rabble-rousing (tactics picked up from the left, btw) for the problems that exist in getting government health care passed. People have properly been leery of getting the government involved in their health care ever since it was first proposed.
It would be nice if the Republicans could garner public support for their recalcitrance without telling immense lies about what’s going on.
Not a lot of rabble to rouse in gated communities.
Legislative government might be beholding to us at the voting booth every few years, but most of the time they are beholden to the lobbyists with the checks. Or, if they are Republicans, to Rush.
Why would someone in adminstrative government randomly refuse someone? Unlike someone in business, their loyalty is to the taxpayers, and their bosses, not to the stockholders. Sure, some are incompetent, but that is not exclusive to government. If some burger jock at Mickey D’s gets your order wrong, that is not an indictment of capitalism.
If some bureaucrat is being truly obnoxious, you have the option of going to your local legislator to complain - and no doubt the problem will get fixed in no time. Try that in business.
BTW, I had to renew my drivers license yesterday, facing the awful MVB bureaucrats in understaffed California. This involved an eye test, a new photo, and a thumbprint. I was in and out of there in under 20 minutes. When I’m stuck going to Lucky’s, I spend more time than that in the checkout line. Not only was the system set up efficiently, there was a guy who asked who was waiting for a license renewal and gave us our eye test while we were waiting for a clerk to open up. Awesomely efficient.
You do realize that you are merely substantiating my position that the people run the government only tangentially, don’t you?
I think there’s a bit of a misunderstanding here. It isn’t that I think people will be refused randomly; it’s that I think that in time they will be refused as a matter of course. In much the same way that the government routinely refuses Medicaid and Social Security disability to people who truly deserve it.
My experience has been that bureaucrats who work in government offices know their jobs are secure and they couldn’t care less in terms of loyalty or appreciation when it comes to their taxpayer customer base. This isn’t to say that some don’t do their jobs in a pleasant, helpful manner, but I’ve never seen, heard or read anything that indicates to me that the person behind the counter at a government office or sitting in a cubicle making decisions about benefits feels that slightest bit of alliegance or loyalty to taxpayers.
The difference there is that you have numerous options other than Mickey D’s. When it comes to government benefits and what it decrees you either get or don’t get, you have no other choice. You just have to suck it up and take what you get (or don’t get).
I’m not really talking about obnoxious people; I’m talking about people who simply don’t care and make who make decisions related to health care and other benefits based solely on what they’re told to do by their superiors. If their superiors say "We’re adopting the practice of automatically denying disability benefits upon first application and first and second appeal, then that’s what they’ll do…and then they’ll get pissed at people who complain about it and challenge it because their department’s policy creates a culture that sets them at odds with deserving applicants and they have no say in it anyway. So an attitude of detachment takes hold and they operate largely as automotons and couldn’t care less what the recipients of their decisions think about them.
But even so, they aren’t the real problem. The people higher up who make the decisions to routinely deny benefits in the first place are. And complaining to one’s congressman is unlikely to accomplish anything, or if it does, it’s only to that particular complainant.
I have. And in most cases by far I’ve gotten a satisfactory response. Businesses by and large have to rely on customer good will in order to stay in business and/or to maximize their sales and profits. Government is under no such fear. It couldn’t care less whether you’re happy with its decsions or not.
I know what you mean. Same thing here in the small suburban bedroom community I life in which is next to a sprawling metropolitan area of close to 1.5 million people. However, in that larger metropolitan area it’s not at all uncommon to arrive at the DMV to take a driving test and have to sit and wait for hours and hours, and then at 4:30 p.m. be told that no more applicants would be processed that day and come back again tomorrow. So people are constantly having to take a day off work, spend that day sitting on their ass waiting for the bureaucracy to take care of them, and then having to take another day off to come sit on their ass again in hope of finally getting their driver’s licence the next day.
Businesses do not operate that way. Only entities that don’t care (because they don’t have to) do.
Which brings to mind another problem that plagues government bureaucracies, and that is the matter of funding. With proper funding, there would be enough examiners and enough people shuffling paperwork so that people wouldn’t have to take a number and sit all one day and part of the next waiting to be taken care of. Businesses generally have sufficient people on duty to take care of their customers. Since government doesn’t really have customers but rather some form of supplicants, its attitude is different.
Not a lot of Republicans either, since most are just normal people like ayone else.
This meme of Republicans and conservatives all being rich and living protected, insular lives is utterly false and is the result of deliberate classism on the part of Democrats and liberals, who rely on jealousy and resentment in order to harvest votes from the envious and poor.
No princess, our side has ignorant gullible dingbats, your side is NOTHING but ignorant gullible dingbats and the rich assholes who live of them.
I forgot stupid. Envious and poor and stupid.
To a certain extent- but if you get too stupid, you are too dumb to be envious. And that’s when they get you.
I was mostly talking about DigitalC, but I get your point. 
They already have you. That’s why you’re envious.
Deserve it, or have a right to it under the rules? The question is which group has a higher rate of improper refusal of benefits: those covered by private insurance or those covered by public insurance? There are also appeals procedures. How many people continue to get improperly rejected? There is a benefit for a private company to delay payments, but no benefit for the government to do so - not at any level.
Perhaps you are reading this into their attitudes? I’m not saying they are humming Yankee Doodle Dandy while they work, but my experience has been pretty good. Sometimes they are hemmed in by paperwork, often the result of a legislator crying fraud which makes the 99% of the people who are honest prove that they are. My mother worked for a time reviewing cases in the New York Health and Hospitals Corp. (public) and as far as I can tell no one she knew there took pleasure in throwing out cases that weren’t clearly crap. I worked one summer for the Post Office, and people there were pretty anal about getting the mail delivered accurately.
On the other hand, we have a Pit thread running right now from a guy working in customer service who is instructed to say “no” to anyone asking for anything out of spec.
The problem is when an industry segment - like health insurance - has structural reasons to screw its customer. Every risky customer turned down for a pre-existing condition helps the bottom line. Every month of delay in paying benefits does also. You’ve read the many Doper stories about this. For me, I’ve had no unjustified refusals in 12 years of coverage at my company. We are self-insured, so turning us down doesn’t help the bottom line of the insurance company. Coincidence? I think not.
The high level of satisfaction with Medicare makes me think that they don’t turn people down as much. Certainly my father and f-i-l seem to have had no problems, but that is too small a sample to say for sure.
A manager who takes this policy is being obnoxious in my book, since that is clearly not what the people who wrote the laws had in mind. How far up do you think such a policy would get supported? In fact, most government agencies, given some reasonable level of funding, have every reason to spend all their budget and not save it, unlike industry. I once sold a very expensive set of training credits to a government lab because the department had money left in their budget for the year, and didn’t want to waste it. If you were complaining about the government shoveling money out without proper checking, then I can see it, because that is where the incentives are. You seem to be talking about outliers - which I suspect are rare.
You think a higher up is going to risk really being reamed by doing it to other people? Why? Do you think these people get bonuses for underspending their budgets? What do you think is better for the career of the head of an agency - ending the year with a surplus, and getting his budget cut, or spending all his money and having a reason to ask for more, and for more people? I started out working for a part of the Bell System which operated under this paradigm, and I assure you that underspending was not considered a good thing.
Yeah, subprime mortgage brokers really, really cared about their customers. A business clearly has incentive to give you the minimum necessary to keep you - assuming you are the kind of customer they make money on. Now look at someone in the frontlines of a government office. Whyever would they want to deny a claim and get yelled at when it makes no difference to them or the agency if they pay it? It makes no sense.
Nope. Not exactly a small place. It was quite crowded, actually - almost no space in the parking lots, almost no chairs available. The secret is that they have an on-line reservation system. If I just walked in I would have to wait; but since I had a reservation I went to the head of the virtual line. I got my first license in New York, so I know my big city DMVs pretty well.
When my daughter took her road test it didn’t take that much longer. It is worse than usual because they close two Fridays a month due to the budget crisis. So, sorry. If you plan ahead, you don’t have to wait. Just like in private industry.
You’ve never had to wait on hold for an hour, have you?
Which cabbage patch have you been hiding in? Been to a department store lately? Businesses lay off people for the bottom line as much as possible, and then overwork anyone remaining. Hell, I’ve taken on a couple of new jobs for this very reason. Now, I’m not denying your point about proper funding, but who do you think is responsible for that? Is it the heads of agencies, who have every incentive to grow, or is it the tax and government haters, who yell at spending too much on bureaucrats - and then yell about having to wait too long when they need government services. If you wait two hours to see a clerk in the DMV you should be grateful for all the tax money they are saving. But you are not alone. One of the problems with the California budget is that everyone wants lower taxes and everyone also wants more services.