I know that Boris Johnson doesn't attend their meetings. He's probably off hanging out with GI Joe, getting stuck on zip wires, that sort of thing.Quote:
I'm not all that familiar with COBRA
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I know that Boris Johnson doesn't attend their meetings. He's probably off hanging out with GI Joe, getting stuck on zip wires, that sort of thing.Quote:
I'm not all that familiar with COBRA
The US health care system is bizarre, to me it seems broken. There is no cost control at all. I had an MRI on my back, luckily I have insurance. When I got a copy of the bill I noticed the cost was $6,000+ but they excepted @ $600 from the insurance company as payment and wrote the rest off. My doctor charges $130 a visit but they except $20 from the insurance as full payment (I think it might actually be $10 but you get the point). So the insurance companies have negotiated prices. So until things change it's cheaper for the government to pay insurance premiums than medical bills.
I'm all for a National Health System. Get control over pricing and then tackle big pharma. Nice dream but not happening in my life time.
I had a plate put in my shoulder not that long ago and there was a mix-up and they thought I didn't have insurance. They sent me a bill for about $17,000. When I called and gave then my insurance information I later saw they billed the insurance company about $45,000 dollars. I called the hospital about it and they said the $17,000 they billed me was a discount because they thought I didn't have insurance. What I think is the $17,000 was the real cost and they billed the insurance company the maximum allowed.Quote:
Originally Posted by wes4dbt
I'll never know for sure but that is an example of how wacky our insurance is.
Pelosi brazenly plans a bailout for the insurance industry in the face of mass unemployment with her scheme. There really is no nuance there at all: she is covering her donor base and leaving many people who don't even have COBRA with nothing.
I don't see any other message here. She seems to be saying "Trump is awful, but we dare to be even worse."
He had Pompeo do it for him...Quote:
I'm anxious to see how he walks this back, if he does at all. I'd also bet when he tweeted that he hadn't said a word to the military.
"Referring to Trump’s tweet that Navy ships would “shoot down” Iranian gunboats that approach U.S. ships, Pompeo said, “What he said this morning, and what I know he’s told all of us in leadership inside the government, is take whatever action is necessary to make sure that you can defend and keep our people safe.”
That is a far cry that he ordered the Navy to destroy the Iranian ships...which the liar never did. I just wonder what our military and allies thinks about him spouting off like that in tweets. It is a good thing the rest of the world ignores what he tweets and waits for what he does.
Consider this...I have not fact checked it myself:Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
A senior US government doctor who worked on the search for a coronavirus vaccine has claimed he was fired after resisting Donald Trump’s push to use the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ne-coronavirus
I didn't get any volume on that so I don't know what is being said but I do know that Faux news has completely backed off promoting that drug.Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/22/media...ces/index.html
We will never know between the moron in chief and Faux news how many people their false reporting and promoting of unproven drugs, for the purpose of the corona virus, has harmed.
Wow i never new that Fox news were such experts in clinical trials or had a history of presenting the facts when other less trust worthy news agencies lied through there teeth....
... Oh wait they dont !!!
Why the hell does a news anchor think that they are suddenly an expert in medicine? why does her opinion matter? if she cared about the facts at all should would present them properly.
The french study was carried out on 20 or so patients, and several patients who took the drug, and ended up faring poorly, dropped out of the trial, and their outcomes were not factored into the study's final conclusions.
20 patients is just not nearly a big enough sample size for any clinical trial you cant be making claims of testing 20 people, and secondly how can you let people drop out of a trial and not record there results?, clearly your misrepresenting the numbers if you dont record them.
The New York study was not a clinical trial it was an observational study looking back at patients' hospitalizations, not a randomized clinical trial. It covered 1600 patients with Covid-19 patients divided equally into four groups: those taking hydroxychloroquine; those taking chloroquine, a similar drug; those taking hydroxychloroquine along with the antibiotic azithromycin; and those taking none of the drugs, as a comparison group.
Its not just clear from the study that some patients are receiving azithromycin as well as hydroxychloroquine, its part of the study and yet this is misrepresented as a mistake or failing of the study.
It along with studies in Brazil, Sweden, and a new study in France have all found no statistically significant differences in the death rates between Covid-19 patients who had taken the drug and those who had not.
But despite the mounting evidence this Fox News anchor simply quotes one french doctor (which is ironic as i can't imagine that in normal times a french expert in anything would be used by fox as a trusted source) who's study methods and results has been questioned and seems to use his words as gospel mainly because it reinforces her own case.
This is anti Science and anti sense, yes there are times when the consensus view can be wrong but with drug trials and studies in particular you have to be guided by the evidence not some ones words and believes and the mounting evidence is increasingly clear and it is coming from multiple separate sources and it is come from much larger sample sizes.
Also you've gotta love the bit where she denounces the New York study as a shoddy study clearly misrepresenting what it is, which is an observational study, and also praises french trial as a positive legitimate study.
Finally the claim that the problem with the New York trial is they were giving the drug to people who were to ill, and what they should have been doing is giving it to people who were less ill?
What the hell ???? its the people who become very ill from Covid-19 that are the problem, those that are not very ill in the first place will recover on there own any way without the need of hydroxychloroquine.
It possible still that we find that there is a group of people that benefit from this Drug in helping them deal with Covid-19 symptoms but we dont have any reliable study showing that and until we do we should be rightly sceptical of that claim.
And there in lies the main problem with this report, evidence should come first, it should be clear and it should be repeatable and repeated, we should not just jump something because it fits our narrative and then defend it to the death so we are not wrong about something.
Being properly sceptical about things means following the evidence and being prepared to change your mind based upon it, and if you dont yet have enough evidence then waiting until you do.
There is so much wrong with this reporting that it hurts my head to listen to the wrong headedness of it, and the insistence in following narrative and being right instead of looking at the actual evidence.
OK, couple of things with that last vid:-
1. When someone throws up air quotes around "Scientific Study" in the first 10 seconds of an article it tends to project their opinion of science and how they're likely to use it's findings.
2. She shows some other news sources who may (I cant be sure from the article) have jumped the gun on a scientific paper that says Chloroquine may actually be harmful and she points out that it was in pre-print form and not yet peer reviewed. She doesn't actually give any details about the paper so it's impossible to fact check this. Given the clips she shows it seems likely that the paper does exist (those talking heads are referring to... something) but it's impossible for the viewer to check the credentials of the paper or it's authors. It's certainly possible (I would say likely) that news outlets have been quoting a non peer reviewed paper (they do tend to lack vigour around such things as she subsequently demonstrates - see point 3 below) but her presentation makes it impossible to check the general credibility of it's publishers or whether it subsequently goes on to be peer reviewed. News outlets jumping the gun is a valid criticism but it in know way debunks the science whose gun they jump, all of which says chloroquine doesn't work.
3. In defence of chloroquine she subsequently cites Dr Didier Rault's recent (non-peer reviewed - so, yeah, there's that) study that says Chloroquine has had positive effects on 90% of patients. In case you don't know him, this is Dr Didier Rault. He's the inventor of Chloroquine. His credibility is currently collapsing and he has a clear vested interest.
4. It's Fox News for Christ's sake. They're about as credible as Moon Landing Conspiracies.
At that point I stopped watching, because what's the point?
She doesn't. She explicitly says "I'm not a doctor, nor do I play one on television..." and then goes on to give her expert opinion.:rolleyes:Quote:
Why the hell does a news anchor think that they are suddenly an expert in medicine?
And guess who the moron in chief listens to...Quote:
Originally Posted by FunkyDexter
"Laura Ingraham, Fox Guests Met With Trump at White House to Tout Unproven COVID-19 Drug: WaPo"
https://www.thedailybeast.com/laura-...ne-report-says
LOL, well I have to give you that.Quote:
Originally Posted by FunkyDexter
My point was that this particular topic has become something of a fact-free emotional sporting event on both sides of the question, so why not let the other side play?
Sure does get the knees jerking though. There must be something to the theory that many have a weird S&M relationship with their Trump-photo plastered bedroom walls.
That is what I suspected was going on ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
Just what we needed; another complication.
This article is about blood clotting due to the virus. If you are not aware of it you should read it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/healt...s-blood-clots/
On some of the stuff you've posted, yes. Like I say, I really like the idea of universal health care but I don't believe universal insurance is the same thing and I don't really see either of your parties pulling for what I believe is the right solution.Quote:
My point was that this particular topic has become something of a fact-free emotional sporting event on both sides of the question, so why not let the other side play?
On other stuff, maybe. I honestly don't know enough to either support or deny your claims about Pelosi's corruption. I want to have more of a look into that but haven't had time yet. It sure wouldn't surprise me to find out that a politician (of either political leaning) is lining their (and their friends') nest but it also wouldn't surprise me to find that a politician simply proposed what they thought they could pass and the other side chose to miss-represent it as something it's not. Definitely something worth finding out about.
On Chloroquine and the science around it, hell no. The credible scientific is in complete agreement that there's no evidence it does a damn thing (which is not the same as there being evidence it does nothing) and I haven't seen anyone claiming it does whose agenda was anything other than purely political.
It's behind a pay wall so didn't read it. It sounds like what Dil posted in post 633. Is it something different?Quote:
This article is about blood clotting due to the virus. If you are not aware of it you should read it.
Universal insurance was all that COULD be passed, and that just barely. Universal health care is considered too high a lift for the US, at this time. Perhaps that will change as a result of COVID, but not likely. Costs for health care in the US are totally nuts. Wes4dbt (dbt....debate? Are you subject to debate?) mentioned one case of crazy costs, but there are any number of them. Comparisons for costs of procedures between hospitals in a single city always show wild discrepancies up to an order of magnitude, or more, difference. Health care executives generally can't explain the bills any better than the average person, either. It's a system. A large, ungainly, system, not well understood by people either inside or outside.Quote:
Originally Posted by FunkyDexter
For that reason, when I need a random number for a program, I use a quote for some procedure out of a health care web service. It's guaranteed to be a more random value than any built in random number generator.
This is a large and well known issue with Washington politics. I wouldn't say that it is fiercely debated. It is just used as a convenient club to bash those you don't like, but since it's so incredibly common, you can only really do that if you ignore the bit where the people you DO like are doing the same thing.Quote:
It sure wouldn't surprise me to find out that a politician (of either political leaning) is lining their (and their friends') nest
Members of Congress, along with senior staffers, get paid fairly well, but not very well by private sector standards. Some people object to how well they get paid, which is a fair objection, but the intention was to try to immunize them against bribery. What has ended up happening is that they can simply step out of office into lucrative private sector positions. After a few years in Congress, they can become a lobbyist or a 'consultant' for several times what they made as a sitting member.
This is understandable, of course. Decisions made in Congress can make or lose millions or billions from industries, so they have a VERY strong financial incentive to influence whatever, and wherever, they can. With the amount of money sloshing around Washington, if you aren't trying to influence it in some way, it's almost fiscal malfeasance for any large industry.
There are various attempts to stop that, such as forbidding people from registering as a lobbyist for N years after they leave office, but that's hopeless. There are too many ways to get around such rules.
I don't have a suggestion.
I'm not sure because I rarely look at video news. Maybe the dark spots on the toes were blood clots. It is all over the news now so you will probably run into it. It may explain many of the mysterious deaths that seem outside the scope of a "normal" virus. There is also news this morning that many of the sickest people didn't have fevers. That is scary too.Quote:
Originally Posted by FunkyDexter
If you have flexible morals, like me,you can use Google Chrome incognito mode to get past the Washington Post paywall. It locks you out after a few articles but if you just shut down Google and bring it up again you can start over.
Not debating you, you know to many big words. No, that was my user name at a programming business I worked for, call "D"ata"B"ase "T"echnology. Pretty clever right?Quote:
Wes4dbt (dbt....debate? Are you subject to debate?)
If you want to add another observation about the virus, Read this yesterday, one place is thinking about suggesting people wear a nicotine patch. Their information showed smokers infection rate was lower than non smokers. The down side is they tend to do worse if they did become ill.
I think maybe Phillip Morris might have ran that study.
I feel like your insurance based system is probably a large factor in that and I honestly don't think you will ever have a healthy health system without root and branch reform. Trouble is that democratic system tend to favour bureaucratic inertia so I don't reckon that'll happen without a major crisis to trigger it. As you say, Corono could do it but probably not. The political entrenchments on either side see to just be deepening on the back of this.Quote:
Costs for health care in the US are totally nuts.
I do get (and actually quite admire) the whole American spirit of independence and self sufficiency thing and I think that it's been a beneficial part of your culture, for the most part. But I also think that a basic safety net is fundamental unless you're happy to let people suffer and die when things go wrong for them. I think your safety net's pretty good in most areas but, weirdly, at some point in your history you contracted the health safety net out to the private sector... and then wondered why it tried to wring as much cash out of the system as they possibly could.
I'm willing to bet sometime today we hear about somebody ingesting or injecting some kind of chemical disinfectant because of what Trump, aka the moron in chief, said about it on nationwide TV:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177
Edit:
Lysol put out a warning about ingesting their products...
OK, so I though I'd do some research on Pelosi's links to the health insurance industry and I really can't find anything substantive. This may be a failing in my google-fu or it may be that there's simply nothing substantive to find.
I should say that this has just been a general scout round the internet and I haven't checked the political leanings of the sources I found (to be honest, I found so little of interest it didn't seem worth chasing them down).
About the most interesting thing I found was this article on Politico which cites OpenSecret.org as it's source. It's old (2008 old so likely not reflective of the current situation) and it states that she received $218, 000 from insurers in the 08 and 10 cycles (not 100% sure what that means so I assume we're talking about the financial years from 2008 to 2010). It does say that this is from all insurers, not just health but I guess it's an indicator.
Now, I'll admit, that sounds like a shed-ton of money to me (though not that much - an IT contractor can make that in a year) so I wanted to find some context. Turns out the highest contribution of this type by a democrat was roughly double that at $400, 000 by Steny Hoyer. In case this leads us to the false conclusion that this is a Democrat conspiracy, the top two Republicans, John Boehner and Eric Cantor received $530, 000 and $560, 000 respectively.
That was the worst thing I could find about her on the subject and it reads like a whole, heapin' pile of nuthin' to me. I can see there were some stories at the time saying that she should give the contributions back so I guess it was a bit of a scandal at the time but, I'm sorry, I just don't see it from where I'm standing. And it's over a decade old so not really relevant to the current discussion anyway.
So where are the sources I'm missing?
For comparison I went looking for Trump contributions from the health industry. Unfortunately, due to Trump's whole fiasco where he falsely claimed that he'd got the insurance companies to waive co-pays (I guess that your equivalent of an excess?) I just kept getting presented with a wall of noise around that instead. Now, I do get the impression that Trump pulled in the right direction on that one but claiming a negotiation victory that he hadn't actually achieved does rather play into the ongoing rhetoric that you can't believe a word the man says.
He went on to suggest heating the body up to kill the virus. For context: the virus is killed at roughly 60 degrees. So nothing wrong with that plan then.Quote:
I'm willing to bet sometime today we hear about somebody ingesting or injecting some kind of chemical disinfectant
Anyway, the Germans tried out injesting chlorine bleach into lungs way back in 1917. That was 2 years before the Spanish Flu even hit so they were well ahead of the curve. Very few of the people they treated in this way ended up dying of the flue so it appears to have worked:eek:
Are you being sarcastic? The body's average temperature is 98.6. If that was true no one would be sick.Quote:
He went on to suggest heating the body up to kill the virus. For context: the virus is killed at roughly 60 degrees. So nothing wrong with that plan then.
We tend to use Celsius over here (at least in medical circles). So, in backwater colonial terminology:p, you'd have to raise the body temperature to 140. Try that and it's a sure fire guarantee you won't die of Covid so, technically, he's right.
You also drive on the wrong side of the street :rolleyes:Quote:
Originally Posted by FunkyDexter
When you see even years with cycles like that, it usually means election cycles... so those were the 08 and 10 election cycles... if it was fiscal years it would have been 08FY and 10FY.Quote:
Originally Posted by FunkyDexter
So she recieved $218,000 from the insurance lobbyists during the '08 and '10 election campaigns. Considering that was across two election cycles, that's not a lot at all. even if it was 218k in each cycle, that's still not as much as I would have expected.
-tg
Two years old, but:
https://truthout.org/articles/meet-t...ite-democrats/
Quote:
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (California 12th District, 1988-present): $2.5 million
Despite running in a safe district, Pelosi still receives large contributions from the industry. Health professionals are her leading donors since she took office in 1989. They account for nearly half of the $2.5 million she has received from the health sector in total.
Due to her safe seat and high-profile position, she is a tenacious fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which is also indebted to major stakeholders in the industry. At the time of writing, the DCCC had received more than $3.8 million from health professionals and $1 million from pharmaceutical companies so far in 2018.
Pelosi’s relationship to donors is obviously important given her desire to be speaker of the 115th Congress, should Democrats take over. She has continually insisted the party’s voters are not ready for single-payer despite the fact that it polls better than the Affordable Care Act.
Considering the current cost of Congressional races, that's nothing. That's one of the problems, though. When a quarter of a million dollars is insignificant in a Congressional race...there's probably too much money in there.
It is possible that Trump is actually thinking about the economy rather than health... the odd "health advice" he comes out with may be with the intent of creating the biggest ever group entry for the Darwin Awards, which in turn will lower unemployment. :sick:Quote:
Originally Posted by TysonLPrice
The good news is that any people following the advice are people would have voted for him, so he's less likely to be re-elected.
Although this time COVID-19 has brought great disaster to the world, but after a large number of tests and research by universities and medical research institutions in the United States and Europe, more and more test data show that COVID-19 is more like a severe flu, and its fatality rate is similar to flu. Why is this?
Similar, yes, but different in two ways: It appears to be about three times as easily transmitted, and about ten times as deadly. That ten times figure may sound pretty high, but the seasonal flu sounds like it has a death rate of about 0.1%, so even a 1% death rate for COVID would be ten times as high. At one point, COVID looked like it might be as high as 3%, and that has been dropping. Will it reach 0.1%, and therefore match the seasonal flu? That seems unlikely, to me, but it is trending downwards, so who knows where it will end up.
As for the transmission, the figures I heard were that the a person with the seasonal flu will transmit the flu to, on average, one other person. For COVID that would go to an average of three other people. There are some sideboards to that which makes it not true in the real world. Those figures are based on what an average person in a population with zero immunity would do. Once an increasing number of people around that one infected person have had the virus, and are immune, then the transmission rate drops in practice. The point being that COVID is roughly three times as easy to transmit than the seasonal flu.
Add a greater transmission to a greater death rate, and the impacts start getting real.
But it isn't ...Quote:
Originally Posted by dreammanor
Here in South Carolina... in just 5 weeks alone, the number of deaths from COVID-19 surpassed the number of deaths from flu from the previous six month span... It is NOT the flu. As of last night, there were 150 deaths, and almost 5000 confirmed cases in the state... that's a 3% mortality rate...
The only reason it keeps getting compared to the flu is because of the symptoms... But so does food poisoning... only with out the fever.
Even still, even if it's like a sever flu, people take the flu seriously, so why shouldn't we take something that's even more sever more seriously?
-tg
I think what most people are saying is that there are a ton more people infected than we know. So your # of 3% mortality rate is blown out of porportion because there are 10x more people infected than we know.Quote:
Originally Posted by techgnome
However, even if it ends up being 0.1% like the flu, the fact that it is 4x as contagious will cause a lot more deaths.
I don't think so.Quote:
Originally Posted by kfcSmitty
I don't believe mainstream
If scientific papers like https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 are too mainstream for you, I can definitely see why you think it was made in a lab...
It can't and won't be as low as the flu numbers. First, there's herd immunity that exists as well as existing vaccinations against it... it's why millions of people get the flu shot every year. It sticks around because there are also millions of people that for what ever reason also don't get it. Secondly, the time frame for the flu seems to ebb and flow with the seasons... with COVID... there's no telling what will happen when the summer months roll around - for all we know it may end up making the darn thing more active. In which case we're in for a real shift storm if that happens.Quote:
Originally Posted by kfcSmitty
It still bugs me though that a lot of people still don't seem to be taking it as seriously as they should. If it was just their lives they were putting in danger, I wouldn't care. But they aren't. It's a dangerous game they're playing.
-tg
Fangzhouzi(Fangshimin）Twitter: --- By Google Translator
The results of the New York antibody spot check came out. In New York State, 13.9% of people have antibodies against the new coronavirus, that is, 2.7 million people have been infected (most people do not know that they have been infected), and the New York infection mortality rate is about 0.5%. The proportion of antibodies in New York City is as high as 21.2%, which is consistent with the nucleic acid detection of maternal women in the hospital some time ago.
https://twitter.com/fangshimin/statu...257730/photo/1
https://twitter.com/fangshimin/statu...257730/photo/2
https://twitter.com/fangshimin/statu...257730/photo/3
https://twitter.com/fangshimin/statu...257730/photo/4
In addition, some time ago, the test results from Harvard University, Stanford University and MIT in other states were that the actual number of infections was 50-80 times the number of people examined, and the estimated mortality rate of infections is about 0.1%.
Well those figures do, at first, look higher than what I found but they are totals since 1989... so over a course of 30 years.Quote:
Despite running in a safe district, Pelosi still receives large contribuitions from the industry. Health professionals are her leading donors since she took office in 1989. They account for nearly half of the $2.5 million she has received from the health sector in total.
You also quoted the figure she has received from the whole health care industry and it says "health care professionals" made up roughly half of it. The figure from Health Insurance was given as unknown in that article but it does say $392K came from pharma and $1.6 million came from Professional organisations. That leaves about $500k unaccounted for. Assuming the whole lot was from insurance companies that's still comfortably less than $20K per year. A burger flipper makes that.
Even if (and the only reason you would do this is because "professional organisations" is ill defined and might include insurance companies) you take the whole lump sum of 2.5 mil and accredit the whole lot to insurance companies it's $83k per year. Any professional programmer can expect to make that or more as they advance in their career. It's dwarfed by other democrats and further dwarfed by Republicans.
I have no particular desire to defend Pelosi, I couldn't care less about her. But the stuff you're citing simply doesn't rise to the criticism you seem to want to make. Even that article, which is clearly going out of it's way to represent the data in the most partisan way possible, simply fails to meet that bar.
Cool, I've got some sure fire investments for you.Quote:
I don't believe mainstream
Ah, that makes sense. So is it fair to say that 08 and 10 reflect roughly 2 years because most contributions come in the year preceding an election or are they spread more evenly cross a whole four years.Quote:
When you see even years with cycles like that, it usually means election cycles
Fangzhouzi(Fangshimin）Twitter: --- By Google Translator
Stanford University's antibody investigations in the Silicon Valley area and the University of Southern California's Los Angeles area used reagents from the same biotechnology company (Minnesota, not China), and the results were all about 0.2% of the death rate of New Coronavirus infection. This caused dissatisfaction among many people on the Internet, criticizing them for not considering the sensitivity and specificity of the reagents, which was actually discussed in Stanford's paper. And the key is that the results are consistent with other research results.