345 Comments

that must have been one heluva shot

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Two years ago, when I was still working and had employer-provided health insurance, I was given a referral for a gallbladder operation. I had to wait 6 weeks, 50% longer than the cut-off for the above chart. This wait had nothing to do with my insurance, but everything to do with the availability of specialists.

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Lol, Dok, you missed the fine print on that last "waiting time" chart: "Results exclude seniors who never attempted to get an appointment." Possibly because they couldn't afford one. I'm thinking that chart wouldn't look so good for America.

But hey, ensuring that people can't afford the service is an efficient free-market approach to keeping queue times down.

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Where Mao Goes We Go All! Make America Communist Again!

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Thinking of that "whose money/on whom" table above, what is missing is an example of the inefficiencies in the upper left-hand corner. May I suggest "someone spends $200 million on a status-symbol yacht that he will use less than 2% of its value time, then spends $5 million on lobbying to ensure that he won't pay the fair amount of taxes on his toy that could permanently fund the actual personnel needs of 2 or 3 high schools".

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Of course!!!!

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They don't even the full sized pickups in Finland.

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It's always been "experts" that have been telling us that socialism is bad, just like they do on protectionism that Trump supports. Trump is a populist except when it comes to socialism.

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It's already too much for them.

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Who has read on what happend to Vermont recently?

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my own one-woman operation is a lot like that. plus, the accountant never manages to issue invoices so salaries are always late.

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Oh, the strawmanity!

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Excellent point.

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Not to mention, the Ford Ranger is not even the Full-Size pickup, that would be the F-100. Or is it now considered Super-Size?

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But the CEAs knew, by Jeebus, that Marx deeply wanted a great big American pick up truck, and despised those who had them. Hence, the Communist Manifesto.

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I'm canvassing for Sean Casten, who is running for Congress in the IL Sixth district, the nearest competitive race to where I live. In a debate with him, the incumbent standard-issue Republican, Pete Roskam, trotted out the old "Socialism! (cue scary music)" canard. Sean, who is a successful clean energy entrepreneur, noted that neither purely socialist nor classic laissez-faire capitalist economies have ever worked at all well. He then observed that if you examine the history of societies with our degree of income inequality, you see that violent revolutions (which he was quick to note would be tragic) become likely. He finished his answer with a statement that I absolutely loved. "The way I see it, capitalism is the thing we use to pay for socialism." Casten is probably too cerebral to go very far in politics, but it is a privilege to work for him.

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