I'MMA LET YOU FINISH
Fraterniy, equality..
what's that third one??
1st...Montana and now Idaho?
secundo?
Good! Frankly, I don't care which party gets the job done with healthcare--just so long as the U.S. joins the rest of the industrialized world in providing healthcare to its citizens regardless of income.
News Flash:
New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has launched an investigation into the shady $875,000 loan from Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club to Air Amerikkka.
Bah!
What good is your health without OIL?
Good thing I held onto my Mao jacket.
For Wal-Mart it would be more like restitution. I mean all those workers who they nudged towards welfare healthcare by giving them information on how to apply.
why does air america have 3 k's?
it must be a strikeout reference.
Growing long potatoes doesn't give you the right to destroy the free market system.
For my money this is just a ruse to make people think they are doing something about healthcare. If the repukes write the bill you can bet NTodd's pants there will be so many loopholes that fewer people will be covered than are covered now.
We need, single payer national health.
Great, now they're going to take credit for that idea, too?
I'm famished. Can we boil or fricasse 'starving inner-city child'?
Great, now they're going to take credit for that idea, too?
Like the withdrawl from Iraq next year....
I read an Op-Ed piece the other day about how the savings to shoppers are greater than any of the costs -- I don't buy it -- handing on the costs of health care & sometimes foood stamps & other government programs to help the poor is an insiduious policy on the part of Wal-Mart -- Henry Ford was a loathesome man in many ways, but he paid his workers enough so that they could afford to buy his products -- which is a sound policy!
We just had a local ballot initiative that approved re-zoning agricultural land for Wal-Mart to move in -- sold on the basis of all the jobs that it will bring in -- omitting to mention that every big discount store that has moved into the area has killed the previous big discount store to move into the area -- retail has a finite upper limit!
N Todd Ya bet me to it. The first thought into my mind was- every f'n idea that we begin they some how steal and twist. They are the wroght iron facade and we are the marble columns.
Prior A-
I read the same editorial. It was a superb piece of logic if you believe that this country was founded for the betterment of corporations rather than the citizenry. Otherwise it was a piece of crap.
The only way this country will ever have a universal health plan is when the cost of :
a) having business subsidizing the health- care leeches grows to be too expensive, or
b) the cost of NOT having any health care drives away investment.
Of course, by my way of thinking, we should have had universal health care 15 years ago.
Betcha AZ bellies up to the bar next on this. The just published stats on the numbers of employed people being forced onto the state system have irritated the hell out of the powers. It's one thing to have 80 or 90 state employees having to resort to AHCCCS - it's another when it's thousands of Walmarters.
Workers on AHCCCS
● Top retailers in Arizona based on work force size and the percentage of workers on AHCCCS:
1. Wal-Mart: 9.6%
2. Bashas': 5.3%
3. Kroger: 5.3%
4. Albertsons: 2.3%
5. Home Depot: 2.6%
6. Target: 5.4%
7. Safeway: 4.9%
8. Walgreens: 4.3%
o! so now were going to do something about health care/ i'm sure it will be just enought(very little) to keep us from rioting in the streets/
spinoza --
I confess I liked your Philosophical and Theological Tractates better than your ethics -- just sayin'
As I totter into my dotage, I find the definition of a corporation as an artificial person increasingly problematic (& as a solumnly professed memeber of the monastery chapter, I am part of a corporation myself)
Hey, troll!
Why do you keep wanting to remind people that REPUBLICAN OPERATIVE EVAN COHEN conned his way onto the AAR team, then screwed them and the kids?
Yessir, folks -- each time the name "Gloria Wise" is mentioned, it just reminds us all that REPUBLICAN OPERATIVE EVAN COHEN showed his GOP ethics (or lack thereof), which is why Air America got rid of his lying, corrupt Republican ass back in May 2004 -- well over a year ago!
I confess I liked your Philosophical and Theological Tractates better than your ethics --
Prior Aelred-That's why I didn't publish it during my lifetime. Goddamn estate executors!
Why do prominent Idaho Republicans hate our freedom?
GWPDA --
Fascinating stats -- I had no idea that Target was so bad
great -- way to go democrats. cause as soon as it's understood that idaho republicans are endorsing this idea, and it gains widespread public acceptance, who the fuck do you think is going to get the credit. and rightfully so, if they are successful.
Progressivism in Idaho???
Let's see, it's not April 1.
If it's not a typo. Mehlman will have them excommunicatetd shortly.
Prior - actually, because they're percentages, those figures are a little misleading. Target's size is a lot smaller in the state than Walmart's. This is a reasonable comparison tho:
"Wal-Mart offers health insurance to full-time workers and their families after 180 days on the job. Part-time workers are eligible after two years, but they cannot insure their families. The company's least-expensive plan costs about $40 a month for an individual, but it has a deductible of $1,000.
....
According to AHCCCS, most families on the program have one worker and an average of 1.7 children and cost the state about $5,550 a year. Applying that formula means Wal-Mart workers cost about $15 million per year and McDonald's, whose benefits vary by owner, cost about $5.5 million. Workers for Bashas' cost about $4 million a year.
The locally-owned grocery chain [Basha's] said it cannot speculate on why more than 700 of its workers turn to the state program for insurance, because it has a workforce of 14,000 and insures more than 20,000 people through its programs. Spokeswoman Diana Bejarano Medina said the company pays the entire premium for its full-time workers and their families after 120 days on the job. Part-time workers are eligible after six months, though they have to pay a premium for their families."
watertiger re: the photograph; speaking as a white male when do I get to assume a major role in the African-American Leadership Summit?
and why do the neo-con(nivers) get ALL the fun!!!???
spinoza --
The Letters are also great fun
GWPDA--
Again -- fascinating -- I understand now why I had never heard of Basha -- it looks like some of their workers are taking the chance that no one in the family is going to get sick & then going to the state for help -- the plight of the working poor is especially dire (we just finished reading David K. Shipler's "The Working Poor" in refectory -- it is really disturbing -- I recommend it to those who are strong)
● Top retailers in Arizona based on work force size and the percentage of workers on AHCCCS:
1. Wal-Mart: 9.6%
2. Bashas': 5.3%
3. Kroger: 5.3%
4. Albertsons: 2.3%
5. Home Depot: 2.6%
6. Target: 5.4%
7. Safeway: 4.9%
8. Walgreens: 4.3%
GWPDA, yclept Irate Scholar
GWPDA why haven't you included 'Billy's Bucking-Bronco Boozecan for Babes and Bullwranglers' in your list of top Arizona employers?
I don't know if this is the right thing to do. I really don't know if it's the business of businesses to have to pay that money. I don't understand why health insurance can't be more like social security in the manner of it's handling and finances?
MYOB'
.
MOVIE REVIEW:
if you haven't yet seen 'The Motorcycle Diaries' I highly recommend it. Saw it last night- marvelous film.
sorry everything I've said is practically OT. oops.
Wow, this is an extremely serious breach of party dicipline. Understandable I guess because in this one case The Party has kept the ideological correct position secret.
That position is that health insurance should NOT be employer provided. Sadly for them this ideological stance is totally impossible to achieve. Ending SS they are happy to propose in terms vague enough to mask a bit the eventual outcome but when it comes to health insurance they go from beyond wobbly to total wussy.
Still, the ID Republicans have not just gone wus, they have surrendered to the dark side. This is one small but perhaps telling event which may portend the great unravelling The Party may experience.
I understand now why I had never heard of Basha -- it looks like some of their workers are taking the chance that no one in the family is going to get sick & then going to the state for help
The Basha family emigrated to Arizona in the 1880s, from Lebanon. Like the Goldwaters they sold goods along a circuit until they settled in Phoenix. They are the first and -only- supermarket on the Big Res and run training programs up there as well; again, one of the very very few AZ businesses that deal with the Navajo at all. Good business on both sides tho. My bet is those 700 are new employees or ignorant or risktakers. The thing about AZ AHCCSS is that it replaced Medicaid some years ago and does a really fine job of covering children, poor and unemployed. It's supported by AZ taxes generally, not a tax on business or a special use. I have absolutely no problem as seeing it as an effective system. But it's not meant to absorb the number that Walmart can generate. I'm fine with state supported health care benefits for the needy - but not for Walmart or Target either so that their incomes will be greater....
I think single payer should be repeated.
I think single payer should be repeated.
MYOB I'm with you. The fact that corporations/employers in this country are the traditional providers of health insurance is a historical accident not a logical necessity. Medical treatment used to be a lot cheaper, so it was a reasonable perk to offer to attact employees. But there's nothing inherently superior about doing it this way.
I listened to an infuriating call-in show about this on NPR a few weeks back. Had a spokesperson for the status quo, and no one promoting single-payer. The status-quo person kept asserting that having employers cover these costs was the right way to do it, on no evidence whatsoever. Pure assertion. "It's the way we've always done it!" No one confronted her with data or arguments indicating single-payer is vastly more efficient in terms of $ spent on actual health care over administration. The whole discussion was forced to revolve around increasingly complicated kludges and epicycles that might keep the present system going, never addressing the question those rube-goldbergian schemes implicitly raised: whether "the way we've always done it" is actually a sustainable method anymore and whether it might actually be worth considering an alternative. Maddening.
Sandiaman, 15 years ago? Shit we should have had it 100 years ago. Bismark started it in Germany in 1889 I believe.
A nat'l health care system must be installed for us and business. It is killing our competitive edge to make businesses pay the health care bill. How can GM compete with Japan auto-makers when Japan gov't pays for health care not the automakers. The same is true for Europe. You cannot compete with foreign countries if the business is burdened with increasing health care costs. It will increase outsourcing if a change is not made soon.
"War for oil, systematic torture, Republicans are Satan, yadda, yadda, yadda..." - Atrios.
Thanks for 2004 moron.
Prior A:
Henry Ford said (paraphrasing), "If I pay a man enough to be able to buy a car, he'll buy a Ford."
The Waltons say, "If I pay a man so little that he can only afford cheap crap, he'll have to shop at Wal-Mart."
On Idaho in general, it is the state with the highest percentage of its working population living below the poverty line. Even state employees are paid poverty wages.
Thanks for 2004 moron.
Cog |
Thank DIEBOLD for THAT, fuckface!
MOVIE REVIEW:
if you haven't yet seen 'The Motorcycle Diaries' I highly recommend it. Saw it last night- marvelous film.
earl in toronto
My daughter's boyfriend took her to see it last year when she visited him in England. She loved it.
"War for oil, systematic torture, Republicans are Satan, yadda, yadda, yadda..." - Atrios.
Thanks for 2004 moron.
Cog
This asshole is bringing up shit that isn't even being talked about on this thread.
did you know that in montana, up until the spring of this year, it was legal to drink and drive.
Aargh! Helloscan doesn't like ordered list HTML tags. I'll have to make do with plain text.
Anyway, a couple of clarifications:
1. According to the linked article, it's only the Republican Speaker of the Idaho House who's pushing this, not the Idaho Republican Party.
2. This proposal is a variation of the "pay or play" health care plan widely discussed during the 1992 Presidential campaign. It's not the most progressive proposal, but it would likely be an improvement over the status quo.
The Idaho Republicans had to be shamed into covering agricultural workers under workmans' comp finally by the appearance of a quadruple amputee [who had gone through a combine I think] while working on a farm and then lost everything he owned to pay for his surgeries as w.c. didn't cover it (and Idaho law prevented him from suing his employer, either). This was just about 3 years ago.
So, much as I would like to believe it, I doubt the Idaho Republicans are going to ask business to provide anything in the way of health care.
"Idaho--the Stupid State"
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