Subj : EGYPT... To : BOB ACKLEY From : BOB KLAHN Date : Mon Feb 14 2011 12:15:52 ... JB>> The US Postal Service just announced how much more they are losing now JB>> due to retiree healthcare benefits they are now paying in advance. BA> These people have absolutely no concept of insurance. The issue is the purpose of insurance. All else derives from that. Most people believe the purpose of medical insuarance is to insure that you get medical care when you need it. BA> Shucks, I'm not an expert on the subject but I know more BA> about it than Obama and his congresscrook henchmen do. Nor Yet all I have seen from you is "risk management". For most people the only risk they are concerned about managing is the risk they will not get medical care, or go bankrupt getting the care. BA> am I an expert on business practices - although I do have a ... BA> graduate level ) - but I know that if the government BA> raises the costs of hiring or keeping employees (such as by BA> raising the unemployment insurance premiums, which are a BA> percentage of payroll, or raising the minimum wage level) BA> that businesses aren't going to run out and hire people or BA> grant raises. Unemployment insurance should be paid on a sales tax, not a payroll tax. That being said, the bill has to be paid. The minimum wage is still not enough to live on decently. A living wage must be the goal. BA> Government employees, including congresscrooks and the BA> executive, always assume that whatever they do will BA> have no effect on the population's behavior - despite a BA> century and a half of evidence that they're wrong. People BA> will alter On the contrary, they assume it will have an effect. Their proble is, they don't recognize what the effect will be. That and trying too hard for concensus. Now it's the fear of the deficit that is forcing anti-deficit responses when stimulus is really needed. BA> Some people have been known to refuse overtime, and BA> sometimes just quit working for several weeks or months BA> (usually they own the company and can do that), to avoid BA> making 'too much money.' Which is rare, and irrelevant. Someone is going to do the overtime, someone is going to do the work. Reagan claimed one year he stopped making movies in January to keep from paying too much in taxes. Does anyone think those movies didn't get made with someone else? Does anyone think the art of the theatre was deprived of any great work? BA> I remember back in the late 1960s that a fellow in my unit BA> - who was independently wealthy and a real SOB of an BA> attitude case - tried to refuse a (n automatic) promotion BA> from E-3 to E-4 because it would cost him more in income BA> taxes than he'd get from the promotion. IIRC the AF made Which, of course, was highly unlikely. He probably bought into the idea that all your income is taxed at the marginal rate. BA> him take the stripe anyway. Obviously, he did not plan to BA> make the AF a career - but a couple of years later I noted BA> that a fellow with the same name and initial, now an E-5, BA> was being transferred from Wakkanai, japan, to someplace in BA> Europe (while I don't KNOW it was the same guy I suspect BA> that it was, and he would've been on his second hitch). IOW, it didn't turn out to be such a bad deal after all. BA> I find it both amazing and amusing that after 80 years the BA> American people haven't figured BA> out that they're paying ALL of their Social Security and BA> Medicare "contributions" - that half that the employers are BA> supposedly paying is coming out of the employee's paycheck BA> just as surely as the employee's half is, the employer's BA> half just doesn't show up on the pay stub or W-2. I am amazed that Americans haven't realized the employer pays all of the social security and medicare tax. The employer pays all taxes of any kind, as well as all other bills. Unless you have a money tree in your backyard, that is. BA> as Obamacare is concerned, were I running a big insuror I'd BA> give a year's notice policyholders that the company was BA> abandoning the , and then do it. Little known Go right ahead. Other will pick it up. Every other industrialized country has national health care. Most use an insurance based system. Insurance companies still compete for clients under those systems, with a much lower overall cost. It works, deal with it. BA> that a LOT of small insurors that marketed various BA> insurance products have that market, my former employer is BA> one of them. And that was before Obamacare. The insurance industry has been taken over by a few big players, and the small operators have been squeezed out. IOW, insurance does not have an effective free market. BOB KLAHN bob.klahn@sev.org http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn .... "Ho, haha, guard, turn, parry, dodge, spin, ha, whoops!!" --- Via Silver Xpress V4.5/P [Reg] * Origin: Doc's Place BBS Fido Since 1991 docsplace.tzo.com (1:123/140) .