Our manipulation of ourselves and our genes (and those of pretty much every life form around us) will be so rapid as to make evolution nothing more than faint background noise. For those of you that think genetic engineering is unwise or wrong.. how do you imagine you can stop everyone in the world from doing it? Every country? Those who do it will have a comparative advantage, like steroids in baseball.. and then everyone will have to do it. Totally inevitable.

Did you switch jobs after getting a nose job? I've always wondered about that.

And we're talking a billion dollars or so, total cost. Hell, be generous. Ten billion. That's still hundreds of times cheaper than Iraqistan.

Yes, I'm bad at arithmetic. Five billion was more like the right estimate. So. Fifty billion. Iraqistan..

You should post some form of documentation to back up those claims.

Go ahead, call names. I note you didn't bother to post any form of reference, either. I'll happily grant I'm uninformed about the MA public option. You see.. that's why I asked for references (links). Rocket science, I know.

TYVM.. reading now. I was sure someone out there had already done enough research to be able to point out the right places to look.

Good digging.

The first link I consider generally useless, as it fails to prove its premise, instead citing the study that found costs only increased $88M.

The second is questionable, as it didn't target the people who actually use the state option, just "MA voters". How do they know they're talking to informed people? Etc.

The last link, however, sheds some light on why those costs only went up a little. If the hospital is to be believed and the state has simply refused to pay bills (by changing rules on how much they consider reasonable), the state cannot reasonably claim they have a working insurance program.

That side of the story is missing from Andrew's story. I still don't know the truth here, but it seems like more work ought to be done to pull all the threads together before the comments section dissolves into a food fight.

It's entirely possible that by hammering down the payouts, hospitals will be forced to only run tests and give care that is actually necessary (instead of padding their bills with extra stuff that isn't, like (anecdotal) colonoscopies for terminal heart disease patients).

It'd be nice to hear from people who actually have used the program, or who have more links.

No, silly person. I asked *you* for sources because you're not a primary source. The people posting about their lives in Massachusetts are. I'd still like to hear from someone who's gone through the process, but frankly the uniformity of the descriptions is pretty convincing. Whoever thought up the idea of fining anyone who isn't covered the full year was clever, if evil.

If if fails (tempted to say when it fails, but you never know).. maybe this will be the final death knell for big paid content.

In a thousand years archaeologists would be wondering what the religious significance words like "partially hydrogenated soybean oil" and "high fructose corn syrup" had, given they were written on the eternal plastic wrappers of the food we clearly worship (I mean, they'll be able to tell a lot of us were obese).

/TIC

I think you are both right and wrong. First, the tactics being used in the media and the town hells do parallel those of the Nazis in the 30s. I believe they've been adopted by desperate business leaders who think they have no other choice.

I think you're wrong in that we're in bigger trouble than we were a year ago. I think the trouble is exactly the same: our society is run by corporate interests, an aristocracy of short-sighted, ruthless men and women. It didn't look quite as bad when they were running things, as they had less visible levers of power.

The ultimate outcome is unlikely to be global war for conquest or extermination of populations within our borders. This is because the goals of the people pushing this are totally different: they just want to make money and continue to hold power. Their control already spans national borders due to its corporate nature. Hitler and his people wanted different things and were in some ways more limited in method. Their ultimate goal was to kill everyone not them. These guys want to enslave us, instead.

Big trouble, yes, but let's not make the mistake of equating this situation with 1930s Germany.

slightly unrelated, but I wanted to post this somewhere:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/08/07/iraq.kidnapped.boy/index.html

Front page of CNN. Where was the front page coverage of Omar Khadr? Is it more moral to abduct and torture 15-year-olds than 6-year-olds?