Modbert
Daydream Believer
- Sep 2, 2008
- 33,178
- 3,055
- 48
Tell me Bern, did you get any interesting offers in your inbox from any Nigerian Princes lately as well?
Go ahead and find this article on Investor Business Daily and post the link here.
Too bad your chain email was debunked a long time ago.
PolitiFact | Beck says less than 10 percent of Obama Cabinet has worked in private sector
Do yourself a favor and read this article from July 2007:
The Doctor Will See You—In Three Months
I don't think anyone in this country is going to argue that the actual quality of medical service in this country is terrible. The problem is the costs have gotten so out-of-hand that the far majority of people will eventually be unable to partake in the medical service without becoming wage slaves.
I could keep going but I don't think I need to. Hopefully you will take this thread as a learning experience to simply not trust everything you read in a chain email and do the research for yourself.
Go ahead and find this article on Investor Business Daily and post the link here.
Too bad your chain email was debunked a long time ago.
PolitiFact | Beck says less than 10 percent of Obama Cabinet has worked in private sector
We tracked down Cembalest to ask about his methodology. He said any effort to address the topic is heavily subjective, and he expressed regret that his work had been used for political ends, saying that it was not his intention to provide fodder for bloggers and talk show hosts.
Cembalest said that he did discount the corporate experience of the three lawyers we identified — Clinton, Vilsack and Locke — and added that he awarded nothing for Donovan, Chu or Salazar, even though we found they had a fair amount private sector experience. Cembalest acknowledged fault in missing Salazar's business background, saying he would have given him a full point if he had it to do over again. But he added that the kind of private-sector experiences Chu and Donovan had (managing scientific research and handling community development lending, respectively) did not represent the kind of private-sector business experience he was looking for when doing his study.
"What I was really trying to get at was some kind of completely, 100 percent subjective assessment of whether or not a person had had enough control of payroll, dealing with shareholders, hiring, firing and risk-taking that they'd be in a position to have had a meaningful seat at the table when the issue being discussed is job creation," Cembalest said.
Cembalest said he has "written 250,000 words in research over the last decade, and every single thing I've ever done — except this one chart — was empirically based on data from the Federal Reserve" or another official source. "This is the one time I stepped out into making judgment calls, and I assure you I won't do it again. ... The frightening thing about the Internet is that people copy one chart from what you write and then it goes viral. So I've learned a lesson here that these kinds of issues are best left addressed by the people who practice them day in and day out."
Which brings us back to how Beck used Cembalest's data. We'll acknowledge that rating someone's degree of private-sector experience is an inexact science, and it's true that Beck accurately relayed the information contained in Cembalest's chart. But at PolitiFact we hold people accountable for their own words. So we rate Beck's claim False.
Do yourself a favor and read this article from July 2007:
The Doctor Will See You—In Three Months
It's not just broken for breast exams. If you find a suspicious-looking mole and want to see a dermatologist, you can expect an average wait of 38 days in the U.S., and up to 73 days if you live in Boston, according to researchers at the University of California at San Francisco who studied the matter. Got a knee injury? A 2004 survey by medical recruitment firm Merritt, Hawkins & Associates found the average time needed to see an orthopedic surgeon ranges from 8 days in Atlanta to 43 days in Los Angeles. Nationwide, the average is 17 days. "Waiting is definitely a problem in the U.S., especially for basic care," says Karen Davis, president of the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund, which studies health-care policy.
On top of that, only 40% of U.S. doctors have arrangements for after-hours care, vs. 75% in the rest of the industrialized world. Consequently, some 26% of U.S. adults in one survey went to an emergency room in the past two years because they couldn't get in to see their regular doctor, a significantly higher rate than in other countries.
The Commonwealth survey did find that U.S. patients had the second-shortest wait times if they wished to see a specialist or have nonemergency surgery, such as a hip replacement or cataract operation (Germany, which has national health care, came in first on both measures). But Gerard F. Anderson, a health policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, says doctors in countries where there are lengthy queues for elective surgeries put at-risk patients on the list long before their need is critical. "Their wait might be uncomfortable, but it makes very little clinical difference," he says.
The Commonwealth study did find one area where the U.S. was first by a wide margin: 51% of sick Americans surveyed did not visit a doctor, get a needed test, or fill a prescription within the past two years because of cost. No other country came close.
I don't think anyone in this country is going to argue that the actual quality of medical service in this country is terrible. The problem is the costs have gotten so out-of-hand that the far majority of people will eventually be unable to partake in the medical service without becoming wage slaves.
I could keep going but I don't think I need to. Hopefully you will take this thread as a learning experience to simply not trust everything you read in a chain email and do the research for yourself.