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The Power of the SCOTUS III: Roberts' Rules of Order

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Re: The Power of the SCOTUS III: Roberts' Rules of Order

Slap Shot said:
I think that to get the same impact country wide that they do now the lobby would have to spend more at the state level. A US congressman can enact policy that resonates across the country with one vote. You'd need fifty of those votes by state congress members.
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No they dont. You assume that they would want nationwide power but they wouldnt need it. Lobbys could just focus on specific states and really pinpoint where their money goes. Let's say the NRA is looking to push for certain weapons to be legalized that are a bit extreme. To rally Congress you need to have 60 votes in the Senate (since 51 is apparently no longer the majority) and over half of the Reps to get it approved. (many of whom are too liberal to ever support that) That is a lot of money donated to campaigns and a lot of free golf trips.

Now on the state level you dont need to throw all that money away, just rally specific states to your cause and build from there. Plenty of states in the South will probably support you so you find a state rep to put it up for vote and you are golden. Then you target a few borderline states where a few million dollars could sway enough votes and you target them. Swing a couple of them and then you start playing the states off against each other. The amount of money you spend will be pesos compared to the amount you would need to donate to US Senators and Reps for the same result.

After watching the Minnesota Legislature in action (and knowing a couple people in St. Paul) I can flat out tell you I would rather take my millions (if I had them) and gain influence on the state level than try and bribe the criminals in Washington. You get way more for your money.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS III: Roberts' Rules of Order

Handyman said:
Now on the state level you dont need to throw all that money away, just rally specific states to your cause and build from there. Plenty of states in the South will probably support you so you find a state rep to put it up for vote and you are golden. Then you target a few borderline states where a few million dollars could sway enough votes and you target them. Swing a couple of them and then you start playing the states off against each other. The amount of money you spend will be pesos compared to the amount you would need to donate to US Senators and Reps for the same result.
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I wholly disagree there will be a state-level dominos effect and if the lobby wants to see the full impact of their desire for influence and control they will have to spread their money much further around than you surmise. Much further.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS III: Roberts' Rules of Order

I'm sorry to bring old stuff back up, but I haven't been here for a while.
geezer said:
I think you're misunderstanding the problem. It's not that these cases are won by plaintiffs to the tunes of billions of dollars, driving up healthcare costs. It's that the THREAT that any random case against any one individual COULD win (decided by juries) that drives up malpractice insurance costs to the tunes of billions of dollars, which is actually what drives up healthcare costs. My bro-in-law has never been sued in near 20 years of practice, but his malpractice insurance premium is incredibly high - I think it costs him more than his take-home pay. That cost is there regardless if he is ever sued.
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I don't misunderstand the problem at all. My belief is that medical malpractice insurance companies over-charge on premiums, playing on the fear that doctors have of financial ruin if they were successfully sued and didn't have coverage. It seems to me that insurance companies want each doctor to cover the cost, over his or her career, of a medmal suit. But that isn't what insurance does. My car insurance premiums, over my life, will not cover the cost of the worst possible scenario that could occur. Since most doctors will never be sued, each doctor's premiums should only need to cover a small portion of the risk of lawsuit. So what I'm saying is that I believe that they could, in the current system, charge a fraction of what they do, and still maintain a healthy profit margin. In other words, I don't think medical malpractice suits drive up the cost of medical care, I believe unnecessarily high medical malpractice insurance costs drive up medical costs.


FlagDUDE08 said:
Whether or not they are difficult to win, it's the number of Med Mal cases that are in play. It still takes money to hire an attorney to receive a defence (extortion if you ask me; although it's possible to be appointed a public defence attorney, they aren't necessarily up to snuff on medical law), and even then, you have to protect yourself in case the prosecution wins.
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It absolutely is extortion if the case is frivolous, and I could support a GOOD system for quickly identifying and eliminating frivolous cases. But the doctor doesn't have to hire an attorney. That's what the insurance is for. Or, that is what the insurance should be for. In any case, I believe that the insurance industry is extorting doctors by over-chargin g for their services. And by extension, they are extorting the general public by forcing doctors to raise fees to cover insurance premiums.

LynahFan said:
This. Just had a Canadian GP visiting us, and he put the blame squarely on med-mal. In Canada, there are no punitive damages in med-mal cases, so only actual damages can be awarded. His malpractice insurance is C$1500 per year. Equivalent coverage for a US GP is $50k+. Huge med-mal awards are not so common that they alone would cause such a huge increase in cost - but they're common enough that doctor's can't ignore the threat so they have to be insured. The sum total of the insurance premiums has to cover the cost of the awards plus operating costs and profit for the insurers, so the net total cost to the doctors (and therefore their patients) is much higher than the just the sum of the awards and settlements themselves. Eliminate punitive damages and the risk of going to trial would be greatly reduced, so not only would awards come down, every settlement would also come down, and med-mal premiums would sink like a rock.
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I really do think that Canada's health care system has something to do with this being a workable solution, too. I personally believe that non-economic damages have their place. I absolutely do NOT support eliminating them altogether.

In any case, my original point was that the actual cost to medical malpractice insurance companies is nowhere near as high as the cost that they pass on to doctors, who pass it back on to us. An attorney who my company works with recently won the largest medmal arbitration award in American history, and it was something like $70 million. the thing is, the plaintiff is a 12-yr-old who will live her entire life with constant medical bills because of a hospital decision to use a medication off-label during child birth, rather than using a medication designed for the purpose, which would cost $125 more per patient. The reason punitive damages come in is that this hospital was by no means the only one doing this. The non-economic damages send a message to other hospitals that if they get in trouble for this, that $125 per patient they were saving was a bad investment.

I do realize that in the end, that money costs all of us, but the insurance industry loves to make it sound like every filing of medical malpractice result in a $100 million judgment. That just isn't true.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS III: Roberts' Rules of Order

LynahFan said:
It would be a lot harder for lobbyists to build up the sort of long-term crony relationships that are rampant in the relatively small US Congress with its relentlessly stable membership.
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This is exactly backwards. The power of the influence pedlars comes from their near monopoly on information and experience. Term limits will make that imbalance even worse.

Unless you make campaign financing 100% public, term limits just move power from the already underrepresented to those who buy and sell Congress. No thanks.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS III: Roberts' Rules of Order

Kepler said:
This is exactly backwards. The power of the influence pedlars comes from their near monopoly on information and experience. Term limits will make that imbalance even worse.

Unless you make campaign financing 100% public, term limits just move power from the already underrepresented to those who buy and sell Congress. No thanks.
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I did a quick search, but couldn't find a link with the text, but I Dr. John Lott wrote a book Freedomnomics (a reply book to Freakanomics), and in it he discussed some research he had done about campaign contributions. According to his research, contributions don't drive the votes of politicians but rather follow them. That's to say, as an example, the NRA doesn't make donations to politicians to get them to vote in support of something, instead the NRA finds candidates who have voted favorably to stances taken by the NRA and so the group then supports that candidate's campaign fund.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS III: Roberts' Rules of Order

duper said:
My belief is that medical malpractice insurance companies over-charge on premiums, playing on the fear that doctors have of financial ruin if they were successfully sued and didn't have coverage. It seems to me that insurance companies want each doctor to cover the cost, over his or her career, of a medmal suit. But that isn't what insurance does. My car insurance premiums, over my life, will not cover the cost of the worst possible scenario that could occur. Since most doctors will never be sued, each doctor's premiums should only need to cover a small portion of the risk of lawsuit. So what I'm saying is that I believe that they could, in the current system, charge a fraction of what they do, and still maintain a healthy profit margin. In other words, I don't think medical malpractice suits drive up the cost of medical care, I believe unnecessarily high medical malpractice insurance costs drive up medical costs.
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Part of the problem today is the extraordinarily low interest rates we've had for a prolonged period of time. Typically insurance companies of all stripes can earn interest income on collateral posted to maintain required reserves, those rates are microscopic and have been, and so premiums everywhere have been adjusted upward for all lines of insurance to compensate for reduced interest income.


There's a closely-guarded "secret" in medical malpractice insurance, in some states, that allows physician groups to set up a self-insured pool. In other words, physicians know who the risky ones are among their professional peers, and so they will set up their own malpractice insurance company and only allow the known "good practice management" risks to be covered. If you live in one of these states and can find out about one of these self-insured pools, if your health insurance plan includes one of these practitioners, find out if s/he is taking new patients!
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS III: Roberts' Rules of Order

St. Clown said:
I did a quick search, but couldn't find a link with the text, but I Dr. John Lott wrote a book Freedomnomics (a reply book to Freakanomics), and in it he discussed some research he had done about campaign contributions. According to his research, contributions don't drive the votes of politicians but rather follow them. That's to say, as an example, the NRA doesn't make donations to politicians to get them to vote in support of something, instead the NRA finds candidates who have voted favorably to stances taken by the NRA and so the group then supports that candidate's campaign fund.
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Are you saying that if I give the fighter the money after he takes the dive it's not fixing the fight?
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS III: Roberts' Rules of Order

Kepler said:
Are you saying that if I give the fighter the money after he takes the dive it's not fixing the fight?
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I see your point, but I do believe that wouldn't be so much dancing that line of legality but rather running it down and trampling it with a stampede of bulls. And while DC has more than its share of shady characters, I want to think that there are limits even for most of them.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS III: Roberts' Rules of Order

ScoobyDoo said:
To be honest, I have no problem with that law. 20 weeks is plenty of time. I do think there are some exceptions that are rare that need to be accounted for but I have no problem drawing the line there.
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\

Me neither. Its funny how knuckledraggers are desperate to cling to any morsel of "victory". 5 months in is reasonable enough with the exception of medical necessity which is written in the law so no big deal. Apparently North Carolina has had a similar law on the books for years.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS III: Roberts' Rules of Order

Rover said:
\

Me neither. Its funny how knuckledraggers are desperate to cling to any morsel of "victory". 5 months in is reasonable enough with the exception of medical necessity which is written in the law so no big deal. Apparently North Carolina has had a similar law on the books for years.
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It's the traditional legal definition.

It's funny how the same people who think we shouldn't redefine marriage are fine with a very recent redefiniton of life as beginning at conception, an idea that dates from medical professionalization turf battles in the 1920's and 1930's. Prior to that a woman wasn't pregnant until she felt "stirring" -- before that she was simply restarting her period and returning herself to natural rhythm -- basically, she was doing something like relieving constipation.

This is what happens when you have people who believe they are "traditional" but don't know any actual history dating from before last Thursday.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS III: Roberts' Rules of Order

Rover said:
\

Me neither. Its funny how knuckledraggers are desperate to cling to any morsel of "victory". 5 months in is reasonable enough with the exception of medical necessity which is written in the law so no big deal. Apparently North Carolina has had a similar law on the books for years.
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Ironic how people who oppose testing cosmetics or drugs on animals because they are against "cruelty" can so callously shrug off the rationale for the ruling: a 20-week old fetus can feel pain.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS III: Roberts' Rules of Order

Kepler said:
It's the traditional legal definition.

It's funny how the same people who think we shouldn't redefine marriage are fine with a very recent redefiniton of life as beginning at conception, an idea that dates from medical professionalization turf battles in the 1920's and 1930's. Prior to that a woman wasn't pregnant until she felt "stirring" -- before that she was simply restarting her period and returning herself to natural rhythm -- basically, she was doing something like relieving constipation.

This is what happens when you have people who believe they are "traditional" but don't know any actual history dating from before last Thursday.
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Life beginning at conception is a very old concept. Folks like Hippocrates can hardly be considered Johnny-Come-Latelies.
 
Re: The Power of the SCOTUS III: Roberts' Rules of Order

FreshFish said:
Ironic how people who oppose testing cosmetics or drugs on animals because they are against "cruelty" can so callously shrug off the rationale for the ruling: a 20-week old fetus can feel pain.
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I come down simply on the question of viability. Beyond that point if a state govt wants to ban with the exception of medical issues or a rape/incest issue I don't have a problem.
 
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