Comments

1
I agree Dan. We can't lose site of the bigger picture of inequity. Another example is from the Mylan epipen price gouging. The company now says it will address the pricing. But only for this one drug. So many other drugs (like insulin) continue to be huge profit centers. It just isn't right.
2
Bill the vendors of the firearms for the damages received by using be product how it was designed to be used.
3
They weren't lucky enough to be the victims of a mass shooting.


Please think BEFORE you type Dan.
4
The market is a huge part of what makes us humans. We have always depended on markets to drive social interaction, cooperation, progress, and prosperity. The strongest predictor of peaceful interaction is mutual dependability brokered through trade. Where goods cross borders, armies do not.

That being said, even the early cultures that first developed markets and traded with other cultures knew that not everything can be decided by the market, as some things are too important to be priced out of reach, or too crucial to ourselves as humans to be a traded commodity.

Health is one of those things.
6
careful now, you're starting to sound like a "bernie bro" with all that talk on the broken medical system...
7
@3: sarcasm. It's a thing.

Regarding a less morbid and lethal area of charitable giving: If you're going to donate after some iconic natural disaster (currently, the Louisiana floods but Sandy, Katrina, etc) by writing a check to the Red Cross or another relief organization, please make it an undirected donation.

If you write "Louisiana flood" on your check, then they HAVE to spend it on that, even if that disaster is over-funded with donors. But single-family house and apartment fires cost them more in most years than big disasters do - essentially no one donates for those smaller-scale, far-more-numerous events.
8
@7: So what? Sarcasm doesn't add credence to an argument.
9
@2 Don't be an idiot, you can't send the bill to Ford when someone hits you
10
@8) Being a moron who can type definitely adds no credence to anything you blather about.

And by the way, we all find it rather uplifting that you have learned to use a computer!
11
@8) And sarcasm is never "credence", it is use of irony to mock or convey contempt. So you are attempting to scuttle an argument that doesn't even exist. Must be mentally exhausting for you.
13
Maybe the GOP can get behind single-payer healthcare for gunshots, as a corollary to the 2nd amendment. You'd need a background check to make sure your gunshot is eligible (Radical Islamic Terror Gunshot vs Patriotic Defense Of Seized Federal Land By White People Not Indians Gunshot)
14
@11 - You're absolutely right. The word "credence" in that sentence should be replaced with the word "anything" to make sense.
15
No, Dan, This is not a feel good story that is actually a feel bad story in disguise. It is a news story and your editorial. Surely you know the difference.
16
Good post Dan, that should be repeated often.

It's not just health care in this country that's disgraceful. Charitable giving is a bad story disguised as a good story too.

Things would be equitable if ALL charitable donations were pooled together and parceled out to the organizations/people in a manner befitting their need. Breast cancer funding vs. prostate cancer funding is a great example (read this: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/27283197/ns/he…).

It's like what @7 said, people want the "good feels" that their very own personal donation is going straight into the hands of a hungry child or whatever. They don't want to think that their donation is going to buy a little bit of fuel to put in an airplane and get mixed along with everyone else's donated fuel to get the rescuers to their destination. Everyone wants to feel special. It sucks.
18
@3 @8, I'm pretty sure this is not sarcasm. In context, Dan is being literal. Given that they were both shot (both unlucky), one was shot at Pulse and had bills forgiven (lucky) and one was shot elsewhere and did not (unlucky). So.... his statement is just logical (ie: one person can be both lucky and unlucky).

Unless you remove it from its context. At which point it no longer makes the same sense.
19
@9 "idiot" ?
a gun is ONLY designed to kill or wound.
no car is designed to hit people.
simple logic.
20
Hospitals should send the medical bills of shooting victims to gun manufacturers and the NRA. And the gun manuf.'s insurance companies...
21
$5.5 million divided by 50 patients = $110,000 per patient

Those are some expensive hospital bills! And that doesn't even count the portion that was paid by insurance companies. I'm sure some patients spent weeks in the ICU in critical condition, I get it, it's costs a lot of money. But that seems like a very high average medical bill.
22
Or look at the years of running drama over whether or not the 9/11 first responders would get health care. Or the perennial revelations that military veterans aren't getting decent health care. We're always getting dragged down into debates over whether this or that group is fully deserving of health care, or whether or not a person is a member of the group that deserves health care.

Imagine all the overhead spent just on fighting these battles, and proving you qualify, and verifying that you qualify. What if we just took care of everybody, no questions asked?
25
> There are people who were shot in Orlando around the same time, maybe even on the same night (this is America)

Fun fact: I once did a search for "2016 Orlando nightclub mass shooting" but it turns out there was more than one mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub in 2016.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/07/us/orlando…
26
Mandatory health insurance is a terrible failure.
27
From the Orlando Sentinel article, " His seven-hour hospital visit left him with a new nightmare: a potential $20,000-bill."

That's $47 for every minute you're there (in my experience, mostly wait time)

Also - where did the millions of dollars that were donated go to?
28
@9

We require Ford to make a safer car, whether they want to or not. We expect next year's car to be even safer, regardless of how safe last year's car was. We spend public dollars doing research into the causes of traffic deaths and how to prevent them. We're willing to change rules, social norms, and technologies for the sake of safer transport, even when there's no bad guy or malicious intent causing current the transport safety situation.

We aren't allowed to do any of these things with guns. We have every kind of regulation of obscenity and privacy and official secrets, even though the First Amendment makes no allowance whatsoever for limiting speech in these ways, or any other ways. The FCC shouldn't even exist under the First Amendment. The First Amendment categorically forbids licensing TV and radio stations, or arresting people for publishing stolen government secrets or suing anybody for libel. There's no wiggle room in the words. None. "No law" means no law.

Yet we feel free to not read it that way at all. And that's how we've interpreted the First Amendment, and all of the Bill of Rights, since they were adopted until very recently, an exception was carved out for the Second Amendment.

With the Second Amendment, which explicitly declares the intent to regulate arms, just in the last 30 years we've decided to start reading into into it an absolute right to be armed, and the government is supposed to not come within a mile of limiting anybody's gun ownership. It's used as cover to block the existence of any and all regulation.

So yeah, bill the gun makers. Regulate the gun makers the same as we regulate Ford or Comcast and Disney and Edward Snowden and pirate radio. The only thing special about the Second Amendment is that it is the only right the Constitution explicitly says should be tempered by regulation. Conservative know nothings, led by the creepy ghost of Anton Scalia, have got it exactly backwards.
29
@17: Sssshhhh. It upsets some of the more fragile folks here, to point out that sexism can be directed at men as well as women. Just let it go.
30
@29) Care to list any examples? I'm betting not.
31
Send the bill to Saudi Arabia: they were the incubator for this current wave of Wahhabism that the world is suffering through.
32
@21:

I was in ICU at NW Hospital less than 48 hours last December. Total amount billed to my insurance (not including the extremely expensive anti-coagulant drug they administered): $14,900. So, basically, if any of them spent more than a week in ICU (entirely possible), they'd easily hit that average amount, particularly given that almost all of them probably required some surgery as well.
33
It's nice that the bills are being wiped, but I think they should be billed to whoever does the shooting, whether it's a mass shooting like this or an individual one like the woman cited, and that the police should be under orders not to shoot to kill but only to wound, specifically so that the bills can be charged to the person committing the violence. Probably naïve suggestion but there it is. Maybe the people who buy guns would think more than once about shooting other people if they knew they or their families were going to be held liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of medical expenses.
34
@30: I already did. You might want to check your monitor settings, because blue and black text are apparently not differentiated well enough on your screen. I've had the same issue on monitors in the past.
35
Oh Dan, WELCOME HOME, hope you had a WONDERFUL vacation! Now, time to get back to work please ☺ your hilariously on point snark is needed for the shit show that goes by the name of GOP. Oh my gawd, what a freaking mess! LOL
36
I'll take the high road here and assume, despite inferences to the contrary, that Mr Savage would even go so far out of his way as to care about the husband whose privates were cut off and put into the garbage disposal (much to the amusement of Mrs Osbourne). It could well be useful in future, when earnest Rainbow Feminists assure people that "toxic masculinity" doesn't-doesn't-absolutely-doesn't mean that men are inherently toxic, that Mr Savage has asserted roundly to the contrary.

Barcelonasplaining:

"Look at all the people killed in shootings in America!"

"Oh... shootings! But that doesn't mean Americans are more violent than other people. We're just better shots."
37
This whole piece is just another plea for single payer.

Some events are so horrific that there is a humanitarian one-off exception. No need to find some equilibrium or fairness to a system you already find inherently flawed.
38
@36:

"We're just better shots."

Sez who?
39
This reminds me of posts I see criticizing people for donating money to causes that aren't the causes the writer of the post would donate to. The hospitals did a wonderful thing. No matter how much you want to shit all over it.
41
@39 You missed the point entirely.

Imagine this; it's 1783 and you are reading of how wonderful it is that a wealthy benefactor bought the freedom of several slaves. Do you get excited or do you stop and think about how fucked up it is that it had to be bought in first place? Dan is choosing the latter.
42
@39 - Correction, Dan is doing both. He acknowledges that the hospital is doing a nice thing and then goes on to point out that there is a bigger picture.
43
@raindrop (@3) - Your ability to take someone's words out of context, ignore their intent, and get offended by them is not an indication that those words should have been chosen more carefully.
44
@37 "Some events are so horrific that there is a humanitarian one-off exception."

Yes, you're stating the position that Dan just wrote an article arguing against. This is a thing you do regularly, that you assume you contribute something of value by restating what's already been discussed. I don't even think you're bland-trolling. Do you not infer that other people already heard what you are about to say? (You can learn to do better at this, but it does take significant work.)

So to restate Dan's article, what about the events that you don't consider horrific, they merely fuck up people's lives with medical costs incurred through no fault of theirs?
45
M le Comte - Watch Barcelona and find out. The character in question is a bit of a Reagan True Believer.
46
Yes. This is why I love this newspaper; I completely agree. For anyone who'd like to hear alternatives to our (yes, broken, thought so by many way before Bernie came along) systems, 'Nordic view of everything' spells them out.
47
Sorry, "Nordic THEORY of Everything'

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