Yeah.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Friday, February 22, 2008
One last time, folks... Iraq had no WMDs or WMD program at the time of invasion.
No matter what nut-jobs like Huckabee try to claim, there was no current WMD program in Iraq at the time of invasion and we have found no evidence of one since being there either. Even President Bush has ceased any talk of such things. The only really bad part about this entire thing is how we are destined to be there far longer than we should be, because we are afraid of "losing" a war we never should have started.
Check out what our own government's Iraq Survey Group had to say at this website. Here are some great excerpts:
"Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program."
"While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter."
"In practical terms, with the destruction of the Al Hakam facility, Iraq abandoned its ambition to obtain advanced BW [biological warfare] weapons quickly. ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specific work for military purposes."
Check out what our own government's Iraq Survey Group had to say at this website. Here are some great excerpts:
"Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program."
"While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter."
"In practical terms, with the destruction of the Al Hakam facility, Iraq abandoned its ambition to obtain advanced BW [biological warfare] weapons quickly. ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specific work for military purposes."
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia - Once Loved, Now Hated?
I can remember, as a child, what it was like to have Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia as our health insurance provider. We were the envy of many. Every Doctor seemed happy to see that card. My parents claim they never had to fight with them over medical bills and it was the best they ever had.
Fast forward to the 21st century. After a couple of years with Aetna, which was truly hated by every medical care provider we ever encountered, we switch to Blue Cross Blue Shield. Hoping they will be the wonderful provider I remember from my childhood, I am blindsided when they are regarded as only a slight improvement from Aetna by everybody we dealt with. I am further discouraged when they appear to arbitrarily deny claims, apparently with the hope that I will just pay out of pocket instead of calling them and reading the plan details back to them. For a few months they began to deny every claim with a form letter accusing me of having a second health care provider that wasn't picking up their fair share of the bills. This was outlandish behavior from a company that was supposed to be providing services to/for me. They should have been paying me an hourly wage for the time I had to spend undoing their mistakes. There is no such thing as "customer service" when you are dealing with one of these health insurance providers, though. They appear to have a business plan that involves pushing you right up to the point of a lawsuit and then retreating back to what they should have done right from the start.
At this point, I am convinced that for-profit health insurance is not working in this country. The medical profession hates dealing with these companies. The customers/clients of these companies either end up paying for things they don't have to, or they spend way too much time doing the company's work for them. These companies have a tremendous opportunity to prove that they can do better work as a for-profit enterprise than they did as a non-profit, but they simply don't seize that opportunity. They let it pass. They don't care in the slightest. Why anybody works for companies like this is truly beyond me. Do they get up each day and really feel like they are making a positive difference in the world? Do they enjoy telling somebody who cannot currently walk, and is in dire need of full-time rehabiliation, that they can do this as an outpatient? How in the world are they supposed to get to/from the sessions? That's not their problem, they say. They don't feel the slightest bit concerned about the impact of their decisions. If anything, those people sound happy to do it. I figured they had to have a gun pointed at their head to do these things to other human beings, but it doesn't seem that way.
Capitalism is doomed to failure if people continue to believe that responsibility does not come with every dollar. It should be about how everyone can get everything in a better way through capitalism, instead of how the few can skim off money through unethical and nefarious transactions. Blue Cross Blue Shield destroyed their reputation and became yet another bottom rung pain-in-the-ass health insurance provider when they made the decision to go for-profit in 1996. Or maybe it wasn't then, maybe they still did fairly well until hooking up with WellPoint Health Networks Inc. ("one of the nation’s largest publicly traded health care companies"). There is little doubt amongst the truly objective out there that a significant percentage of publicly traded companies have been taken over by greed in the past decade. I have more research to do in order to determine when their fall from grace truly happened, but there is little doubt in my mind that it will link directly to one, or both, of those events.
Fast forward to the 21st century. After a couple of years with Aetna, which was truly hated by every medical care provider we ever encountered, we switch to Blue Cross Blue Shield. Hoping they will be the wonderful provider I remember from my childhood, I am blindsided when they are regarded as only a slight improvement from Aetna by everybody we dealt with. I am further discouraged when they appear to arbitrarily deny claims, apparently with the hope that I will just pay out of pocket instead of calling them and reading the plan details back to them. For a few months they began to deny every claim with a form letter accusing me of having a second health care provider that wasn't picking up their fair share of the bills. This was outlandish behavior from a company that was supposed to be providing services to/for me. They should have been paying me an hourly wage for the time I had to spend undoing their mistakes. There is no such thing as "customer service" when you are dealing with one of these health insurance providers, though. They appear to have a business plan that involves pushing you right up to the point of a lawsuit and then retreating back to what they should have done right from the start.
At this point, I am convinced that for-profit health insurance is not working in this country. The medical profession hates dealing with these companies. The customers/clients of these companies either end up paying for things they don't have to, or they spend way too much time doing the company's work for them. These companies have a tremendous opportunity to prove that they can do better work as a for-profit enterprise than they did as a non-profit, but they simply don't seize that opportunity. They let it pass. They don't care in the slightest. Why anybody works for companies like this is truly beyond me. Do they get up each day and really feel like they are making a positive difference in the world? Do they enjoy telling somebody who cannot currently walk, and is in dire need of full-time rehabiliation, that they can do this as an outpatient? How in the world are they supposed to get to/from the sessions? That's not their problem, they say. They don't feel the slightest bit concerned about the impact of their decisions. If anything, those people sound happy to do it. I figured they had to have a gun pointed at their head to do these things to other human beings, but it doesn't seem that way.
Capitalism is doomed to failure if people continue to believe that responsibility does not come with every dollar. It should be about how everyone can get everything in a better way through capitalism, instead of how the few can skim off money through unethical and nefarious transactions. Blue Cross Blue Shield destroyed their reputation and became yet another bottom rung pain-in-the-ass health insurance provider when they made the decision to go for-profit in 1996. Or maybe it wasn't then, maybe they still did fairly well until hooking up with WellPoint Health Networks Inc. ("one of the nation’s largest publicly traded health care companies"). There is little doubt amongst the truly objective out there that a significant percentage of publicly traded companies have been taken over by greed in the past decade. I have more research to do in order to determine when their fall from grace truly happened, but there is little doubt in my mind that it will link directly to one, or both, of those events.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Friday, February 01, 2008
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