Dallas Blog

The need to breed is strong indeed isn't it? Radical concept you propose there Erin -- personal responsibility. Maybe, it will catch on sometime...........NAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!

Our insurance subsidized healthcare system is a crime as well. Why are insurance companies in the picture at all?

Doctors on average must submit an insurance form 2.3 times at a cost ranging from $13-17 per submission. If you are a surgeon or in traumatic care this is no big deal.

But if you are a family doctor or primary care doctor you are charging $100-140 for a visit. This insurance hurdle take $50 of those dollars. Further, one modest practice I know needed three employees working full time just to keep up with the insurance billing of this one doctor who worked 4 days a week from 10-4. That adds what another $40-50/hour of overhead just for insurance. That's fully a $60 burden on each visit!

Further, a single payer system would achieve tort reform, as suing the gov't is harder and punitive awards are limited. The rest of the world achieves full health care for about 1/2 to 65% of what we spend. Insurance companies role is unique to our system. I think I've shown where that goes.

Health care is not a "free-market." There is no real chance that there will be the kind of real competition that drives prices down when one is in an ambulance or rushing to the nearest hospital. Further, insurance companies are not interested in performing the preventive health care that would save the system hoards of cash. After all, by the time the real dividends of prevention come to fruition the customer has moved on to medicare.

The natural market forces don't work efficiently in health care, therefore, we cannot accept the free-market appeals here. Our compromised system results in gross transfers, for profit to CEOs and other managers who never take a Hippocratic oath and care only for the bottom line.

What would that number be if it didn't include those children along the Texas/Mexico border.

I had no idea that I had been homeless as a child because when you finally find their definition of "homeless" it includes when your family moves in with friends or relatives. Learn something new every day.

As expected by a group that benefits when numbers are higher, their definition of homeless is pretty broad (page 5 of that report):
[i]The Report Card uses the definition of homelessness contained in the subtitle of the McKinney-Vento
Homeless Assistance Act, Title X, Part C, of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and adopted by the
U.S. Department of Education. The definition16 includes children and youth who are:
• Sharing the housing of other persons due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or a
similar reason (sometimes referred to as doubled-up);
• Living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds due to lack of alternative
accommodations;
• Living in emergency or transitional shelters;
• Abandoned in hospitals;
• Awaiting foster care placement;
• Using a primary nighttime residence that is a public or private place not designed for,
or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings;
• Living in cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or
train stations, or similar settings; and
• Migratory children who qualify as homeless because they are living in circumstances
described above.[/i]

It really isn't surprising to know the stats.
it's Bush country, what do you expect????????