Readers' Comments

Being amazed today is not a hard thing to do. The cons are out and about to run us screaming nuts. Yes the right is in power for the good ole boys in Texas cut a wide swath to pick up big checks from our communed held wealth. Those fat cats could care less about the children in Texas for to them our kids are just fodder for them to eat.

And the clowns abound down here in Texas they run the gambit from being totally nuts to on the edge of being put in a straight jacket. Some of the worst are in Congress, others sit as our Judges, and Rick Perry does a good job of taking care and passing the money bucket around to his big buds.

Our children get new text books each year--- I suppose history needs to get a new spin maybe leave a few things out along the way that does not work or sit well with those in power. How’s about new math books has math changed much in the last 2,000 years?

I really appreciate your note and the notes of others who have weighed in. I think you're right that textbooks are probably too small for everything to be included that should be in there. At the same time, with every aspect of history and teaching, it seems, being disputed, textbooks are probably too big a space for what little there is with agreement any more.

And, you make a great point about online learning being the future. I just hope that somewhere in the curriculum or at home kids are taught to question assertions, investigate facts, and analyze the differences between opinion and evidence as well as discern fallacious reasoning in superficially appealing claims, regardless of politics.

Also, I didn't mean to pick on Texas this week! I was there just last month, again, and met some wonderful concerned citizens and super-nice people. Just the confluence of the Board of Ed actions and Dick Armey in the news again....

Thanks for reading and joining in the conversation! Lisa

I think this story I just stumbled upon is one sided.

You should have been at the hearings. It was full of people and everyone had their own opinions. Everything can't be put in print.

The real problem here is textbooks.

You see if we quit going with textbooks and give every kid a laptop and free ISP and put everything (links) online through a State database, it would allow all the info to be read. As it stands we still use books which is just silly. There is just not enough room in a book anymore for everyone to agree with what we teach our kids.

Get over it.

One could argue that politicization of education is an inevitable consequence of public schools with electable school boards; but school board members can and should both show restraint in acting on their own biases and defer to experts when formulating curricula. In this case, the Texas school board did neither. It is not the job of public schools to teach morality, but rather reading, writing, and arithmetic. Personal responsibility for one's actions shouldn't be taught at school; it is something that parents must teach at home, or that should be taught at church.

http://www.theinductive.com/blog/2010/3/16/fake-history-in-texas.html

This is not the first time american history textbooks have been re-written to either leave out important information and include fictitious or one sided accounts of half truths to further propaganda and mind control.
They'll only teach children what they want them to learn to ensure they grow up to be the kind of people who will vote a certain way, buy certain products and continue to be brainwashed to become racist, god fearing, gun carrying misogynists. What's new?
What happens when they go (if they even make it) to college? Are they going to be able to keep up in American History class with all the other facts or is history going to be changed again and again to pacify those already lied to?
Or will history's accounts become what the word ''reality'' (as in reality TV being actually scripted and not real at all) has become? Don't learn this because even though it's factual, it's not my opinion it will be to your best interest.
We're teaching children that it's okay to leave out information (basically lying) as long as it's negative? There are always different sides to a story, is history just another opinion or side to the story anyway and shouldn't there be a choice to which story is the truth? Kids are smarter than you think and just because a history event is negative doesn't mean they can't handle the truth. The truth is they are in danger being at school in the first place. What does these books say about NRA and what does the NRA say about Columbine- if it's even in these books?
Why isn't there more focus on the American History Textbooks that already have these falsities in them? What if these kids are not as stupid as the school board makes them out to be and what if they get their information from other sources (as they often do today with the internet) and they challenge these textbooks?
Will this urge more parents to send their children into alternative schools or home school? I'd like to see if these books say anything about the alleged 'Weapons of Mass Destruction'' and the fact that the US generates these weapons.
Youtube "drunk history"- where you can probably get a better depiction of truth from than these books.

So your system of thought can't withstand the mention of the NRA and F.A. Hayak? Poor baby...

Do you really think legislation doesn't have unintended consequences? It does, and unfortunately, it almost alway will. One side's legislation does seem to have more of it though. Poor baby would rather not have to think about those consequences...

Poor baby.

The first thing Disney needs to define "low budget”. We in the Conferencing Services says that budget is not the end. With the right creative team anything can be good.

Wendell Potter makes a number of good points, but he has thrown in with people whose objectives are to collectivize the economy, and they are just as bad as those Potter "blew the whitstle" on. (He spent half his life working against the forces of oppression and evil – and the other half fighting for them; you figure out which is which.) Instead of having the government grab control of 1/6th of the economy as proposed by the idiotic 2700 pages of legislation known colloquially as "ObamaCare," if we had the moral courage to take ONE STEP AT A TIME, we should be able to agree on any number of BASIC elements, among them portability, intrastate competition,TORT REFORM, private carriers having "assigned risks" divided up among them for those who otherwise would not be able to get coverage, etc.

Anyone who has ever seen an EOB where their carrier settled a bill (including your copay) for 22% of the "sticker price" billed (that is, with 78% "written off") knows that free markets have not worked because we don't HAVE free markets. We have providers and carriers engaged in a tug-of-war that leave patients (i.e., the party for who they are supposed to be Hippocratic oath-bound angels of mercy and financial intermediaries, respectively) out in the cold. The best cure for 2700 pages of complexity is frequently simplicity; we can solve THAT one with ONE SIMPLE LAW, the morality of which is self evident. To wit:

______________________________________________________________
The purpose of this Act is to promote free market competition in order to retard inflation of health care prices.

(1) Any health care provider shall be free to set its own prices for any given service and to change such prices at will (but not more frequently than daily),

AND

(2) each health care provider shall be required to charge the same amount to all its patients for each particular service delivered on the same date, regardless of whether or by whom the patient’s care is insured.
________________________________________________________________

One insurance and economics professor told me that carriers "deserve" discounts for the "tremendous volume" they bring providers. I asked him what financial intermediary "deserves" anything at the expense of the principal party it serves; I asked what medical bill is not billed INDIVIDUALLY to one "customer" (the patient). No one buys 500 kidney transplants at once to get a "discount!"

Under the two simple rules stated above, providers would be at liberty to set their own prices (the absence of which killed HillaryCare). They would also assume responsibility for setting their rates high enough to cover a reasonable profit and some bad debt experience, along with the cost of collections. Carriers would have to LIST their payout rates for all medical service codes in the contract BEFORE they sold the policy to an end user. Patients need to be financially responsible for any balance left over. THIS IS HOW ANY OTHER FREE MARKET WORKS WITH INSURANCE PLAYING A FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARY ROLE.

While other elements (portability, etc.) are needed, they will ultimately fail to provide real reform WITHOUT these rules to rationalize pricing fairly. Further, these two rules in a truly free market would do more to contain inflation in healthcare (and make insurers competitive) than all the other elements added together.

Why NOT do this? And why not do it FIRST?

NOTES:

A. It is immoral to allow the shell game of artificially inflated “Sticker Prices” for health care. In an industry supposedly motivated by altruism and the Hippocratic Oath, it is simply unjust to coerce people into cartels of insurance coverage (whether public or private) and systematically prevent disclosure of real prices – which is exactly what the present system does on nearly every “Explanation of Benefits” form. Whether CIGNA or AETNA pays the bill should make no more difference to either the provider or the patient than the races or religions of doctor and patient.

B. The dishonest quotation of fictitious and exorbitant “Sticker Prices” with phony discounts or write-offs applied to them deprives Americans of the competitive effects of genuinely free markets, and should be banned as collusion by federal anti-trust laws.

C. The call to fix prices (as in HillaryCare) or coerce employers to provide care as a fringe benefit (ObamaCare) distorts the competitive effects of an otherwise free market, and should be discouraged, if not banned outright as illegal.

D. A common objection is “what about those who don’t pay anything?” The truth is, people who are taxpayers and those who are insured are paying for them NOW. Truth in pricing would use free market mechanisms to (1) identify such costs, and (2) bring competition among providers to bear in containing such costs in a way that is not done effectively now.

E. Real honesty in pricing will employ free market competition to bring about more reform in health care in one year than all efforts WITHOUT such honesty can in a decade.

Wendell Potter makes a number of good points, but he has thrown in with people whose objectives are to collectivize the economy, and they are just as bad as those Potter "blew the whitstle" on. Instead of having the government grab control of 1/6th of the economy as proposed by the idiotic 2700 pages of legislation know colloquially as "ObamaCare," if we had the moral courage to take ONE STEP AT A TIME, we should be able to agree on any number of BASIC elements, among them portability, intrastate competition,TORT REFORM, private carriers having "assigned risks" divided up among them for those who otherwise would not be able to get coverage, etc.

Anyone who has ever seen an EOB where their carrier settled a bill (including your copay) for 22% of the "sticker price" billed (that is, with 78% "written off") knows that free markets have not worked because we don't HAVE free markets. We have providers and carriers engaged in a tug-of-war that leave patients (i.e., the party for who they are supposed to be Hippocratic oath-bound angels of mercy and financial intermediaries, respectively) out in the cold. The best cure for 2700 pages of complexity is frequently simplicity; we can solve THAT one with ONE SIMPLE LAW, the morality of which is self evident. To wit:

______________________________________________________________
The purpose of this Act is to promote free market competition in order to retard inflation of health care prices.

(1) Any health care provider shall be free to set its own prices for any given service and to change such prices at will (but not more frequently than daily),

AND

(2) each health care provider shall be required to charge the same amount to all its patients for each particular service delivered on the same date, regardless of whether or by whom the patient’s care is insured.
________________________________________________________________

One insurance and economics professor told me that carriers "deserve" discounts for the "tremendous volume" they bring providers. I asked him what financial intermediary "deserves" anything at the expense of the principal party it serves; I asked what medical bill is not billed INDIVIDUALLY to one "customer" (the patient). No one buys 500 kidney transplants at once to get a "discount!"

Under the two simple rules stated above, providers would be at liberty to set their own prices (the absence of which killed HillaryCare). They would also assume responsibility for setting their rates high enough to cover a reasonable profit and some bad debt experience, along with the cost of collections. Carriers would have to LIST their payout rates for all medical service codes in the contract BEFORE they sold the policy to an end user. Patients need to be financially responsible for any balance left over. THIS IS HOW ANY OTHER FREE MARKET WORKS WITH INSURANCE PLAYING A FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARY ROLE.

While other elements (portability, etc.) are needed, they will ultimately fail to provide real reform WITHOUT these rules to rationalize pricing fairly. Further, these two rules in a truly free market would do more to contain inflation in healthcare (and make insurers competitive) than all the other elements added together.

Why NOT do this? And why not do it FIRST?

NOTES:

A. It is immoral to allow the shell game of artificially inflated “Sticker Prices” for health care. In an industry supposedly motivated by altruism and the Hippocratic Oath, it is simply unjust to coerce people into cartels of insurance coverage (whether public or private) and systematically prevent disclosure of real prices – which is exactly what the present system does on nearly every “Explanation of Benefits” form. Whether CIGNA or AETNA pays the bill should make no more difference to either the provider or the patient than the races or religions of doctor and patient.

B. The dishonest quotation of fictitious and exorbitant “Sticker Prices” with phony discounts or write-offs applied to them deprives Americans of the competitive effects of genuinely free markets, and should be banned as collusion by federal anti-trust laws.

C. The call to fix prices (as in HillaryCare) or coerce employers to provide care as a fringe benefit (ObamaCare) distorts the competitive effects of an otherwise free market, and should be discouraged, if not banned outright as illegal.

D. A common objection is “what about those who don’t pay anything?” The truth is, people who are taxpayers and those who are insured are paying for them NOW. Truth in pricing would use free market mechanisms to (1) identify such costs, and (2) bring competition among providers to bear in containing such costs in a way that is not done effectively now.

E. Real honesty in pricing will employ free market competition to bring about more reform in health care in one year than all efforts WITHOUT such honesty can in a decade.

why not contact our friends at the Chamber of Commerce and let them know how much we appreciate their efforts to make a positive contribution to the legislative process?

You need a team mascot.