Off Topic Landfill

And the number of people who will call an Uber and wait for 10 minutes rather than walk 1-2 miles is even more appalling …

It’s the Uber experience, the tictacs, chargers. You don’t get it.

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But not theirs…

True but the life expectancy has never been longer and the USA has the highest life expectancy in the world if you take out motor vehicle accidents and gang murders

I’m glad to be fitting the bill so that fat people could be on life support most of those lives. /s

Well with Medicaire for all you’ll be footing the bill for everyone.

So you’re saying I’ll be paying for actual coverage unlike now I’m paying for insurance Co profit margins? Scary thing.

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Yes you will be paying a lot more for inferior “actual’ coverage. Here’s the thing I really don’t get. Do you know anyone on medicaire? My parents and all there friends are on it. Everyone of them have supplemental private insurance because there are a lot of things it doesn’t cover or covets half assed. It’s a big business How is it going to be any different when we expand it to everyone?

I have no issue with expanding it to help more people providing private insurance isn’t eliminated and it doesn’t affect taxes.

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Everyone hates the Medicare, and private insurance for that matter, until you try to mess with it. Remember someone wanted to convert Medicare into some kind of voucher program. That didn’t go well.

I also remember someone promised that we all get covered, and it will be cheaper than Obamacare. Still waiting.

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People don’t like change. After getting burned by Obamacare everyone is even more weary. At least some politicians are being honest about eliminating private insurance. The only way we can have a real conversation about any of these things is if we are honest about what they are and aren’t.

I don’t have the answers but I definitely do not trust the people that can’t run the post office to run my healthcare.

We’ll have the people who run the military run insurance companies then. People seem to trust them and throw crap load of money with no problems.

Two things can be true at the same time. I think we spend way to much on the military, specifically defending allies with massive economies like Japan and Germany. However entitlement spending dwarfs military spending. It isn’t even close. Defense 623 Billion. Entitlements 2.5 Trillion. We could cut the military 100% and it wouldnt come close to paying for the proposed new “free” stuff. We are spending out of control in this country. I would be all for cutting some military spending but it would be a drop in the bucket.

[citation required]

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The Japanese life expectancy is almost 6 years longer than ours. Taking out gang murders (also what? That’s such a small subset of firearm deaths in America) and traffic deaths doesn’t move our life expectancy up 6 years.

Easy, here’s one after looking for 3 seconds. There are lots others including the studies cited in the article

" For example, people die because of car accidents and violent crime. A few years back, Robert Ohsfeldt of Texas A&M and John Schneider of the University of Iowa asked the obvious question: what happens if you remove deaths from fatal injuries from the life expectancy tables? Among the 29 members of the OECD, the U.S. vaults from 19th place to…you guessed it…first. Japan, on the same adjustment, drops from first to ninth."

The issue here is you first post was wrong.

The quote is “what happens if you remove deaths from fatal injuries from the life expectancy tables? Among the 29 members of the OECD, the U.S. vaults from 19th place to…you guessed it…first. Japan, on the same adjustment, drops from first to ninth.”

You said removed gang related murders and traffic accidents. Yeah if you remove all firearm deaths it’s a different story. But notice, that isn’t what you wrote.

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The idea being presented was the USA has highest life expectancy in the world when you remove accidental traumatic death. Sorry I obviously editorialized by aggregating firearm deaths and gang bangers (despite the obvious correlation, look at Chicago crime statistics). It’s significant because, as the article points out, accidental traumatic deaths are not a function of our health system so much as a function of living in a country with lots of drunk drivers killing 30,000 (mostly young) people every year not to mention gun violence (also affects mostly very young people)

It’s interesting but displays a common misunderstanding of firearm deaths.6 in 10 are suicides.. Gang violence is then only a component of the remaining 37% of firearm murders. Suicides are what really moves the needle.

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True. Suicides are also mostly young people skewing the statistic downward. Don’t quote me but I think suicide has become the #1 cause of death for ages 15-30 replacing car accidents which a decade or two ago seemed impossible.

I’ve seen other studies that just looked at murders and car accidents so that they don’t include suicides. Those were from about 15-20 years ago. I’ll try to find them.

image

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Thanks for the intelligent and insightful contribution ursus. We all learned something

(disclaimer, I’m not smooth. Never have been. Especially on internet message boards when I’m typing a reply inbetween lunch bites at work)