Correction: I misread the bill, while the part about the individual mandate is correct, legislators were already going to be forced into the exchanges. What the bill does is cut staffer subsidies, and most of those staffers are poor. That’s not something I can support.
legislators would have to get their health care coverage from ACA exchanges like other Americans, and the individual mandate would be pushed back one year. (Remember, the corporate mandate has been pushed backed, it’s only individuals being forced to buy or pay a fine.)
Who is on the wrong side here? The exchanges would still open, those who would benefit from the ACA could still buy insurance and legislators would have the same experience as Americans instead of gold-plated healthcare.
If President Romney had passed this bill (and remember, it is Romneycare on a national scale), and Democrats were shutting down the government with the exact same bill, most people screaming about this would be justifying it.
Bill H
Well, according to the media I’m seeing, Republicans are still trying to get Obamacare repealed in its entirety. Which tells us everything we need to know about the media.
The fact that Obama would postpone the mandate for business and refuse to postpone it for individuals tells us everything we need to know about Obama.
selise
none of the mainstream shutdown narratives make any sense as far as i can tell. seems to me what we’re witnessing is more of a consequences-be-damned political fight on ALL sides than a one-side is crazy the other side are grownups something like an argument over policy
but the propaganda is so thick i can’t make much sense of any of it.
selise
p.s. and the administration decision on who to furlough and what to shut down is something they should (but don’t seem to be) be held accountable for, especially by Ds.
selise
or maybe this shutdown is all about positioning for the “debt” limit (which threatens default — far worse situation) which is coming in less than 3 weeks?
Ian Welsh
Since I find it unlikely anyone is operating from good motives, I’m just look at the actual CR bill, and , um, it’s not objectionable.
selise
@ian, agreed. especially when compared to shutdown. and, after all, it’s been the Ds telling me for years that i have a moral obligation to vote for the lesser of the two evils.
Lisa Simeone
Poetic justice?
http://www.nbcnews.com/business/143-year-old-law-has-lawmakers-treading-gingerly-during-shutdown-8C11319714
Thomas Lord
How many insurers would participate without the individual mandate and what kinds of prices would they offer?
Thomas Lord
One thing about ACA vs. switch to single payer: much easier to implement and doesn’t automatically lead to vast layoffs and industry shut-downs. ACA doesn’t require rapid and radical changes in business model for providers. It kind of “plays the ball where it lies” in a way I can’t see single-payer achieving.
What numbers of people would it take to construct a full scale single payer system and cope with the fall-out on existing businesses? Where would the plan and managerial capacity come from to have them do it?
Ian Welsh
Canada switched to single payer from a private system, it’s not that hard. From an administrative POV its even easier in America. Every hospital and Doctor in America already knows how to bill Medicare, you just go Medicare for all. You could roll it out in less than year. Months probably.
As for the Insurance company employees, well, if you want to find work for them, you can, but since Obama didn’t want to find work for all the people fucked in the financial collapse, I don’t see why that’s a problem for him. (The way you find work for them is the same as whatever plan you think would work for finding working for other Americans who can’t find work and need or want it.) More to the point, they are literally parasites, harming America and their fellow Americans. You’d better off taking the savings and just cutting them checks.
This stuff isn’t hard, every advanced nation in the world has done it, EXCEPT America. Do you think Americans are stupid or incapable, more so than every other 1st world nation’s inhabitants?
It’s a stupid plan, designed to make sure that insurance company profits continue, that the young subsidize the middle aged, and that huge amounts of money continue to go to places like pharma. It will have an initial effect of reducing costs and look good for a few years (this is the prediction I made when it was passed, it is not new), and then it will become a cash cow used to gouge consumers and taxpayers alike. meanwhile it is vastly less efficient that going to a proper universal system, and will continue to produce worse outcomes. You’ll continue, in other words, to pay more for worse healthcare.
Mandos
In a word, yes: in the sense that it has a particular history and culture that identifies something called “freedom” with the ability to find places to extract rents. This is a matter of great popular pride in American culture. For example, an immigrant group in the USA is said to have finally “arrived” when its leaders find a suitable rent-extraction niche. Even if it’s a strictly illegal niche (see the popularity of the Sopranos, which ratifies on TV the Americanness of Italian-Americans, even as it plays on racist stereotypes).
The health reform question is: what is the reform that can be accomplished that protects the ability of existing players to continue to make the kinds of profits (exploit the people) they do? The USA is not Canada, in Canada this form of exploitation is not quite as lionized. No exploitation, no reform.
Thomas Lord
That’s silly in a way that I don’t have much to say in reply. I’m sure you can see the difference between an insufficient jobs stimulus and deliberately destroying a bunch of jobs. As well the problems of destroying all that equity in which, no doubt, a lot of pension funds are invested.
You mentioned Canada. I have nothing to go on but Wikipedia but it looks like it’s been a very long process there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Canada#The_beginning_of_coverage
You mentioned scaling up Medicare. I’ll look a bit further into that one. Related: the VA system got high marks from W.H.O. back around 2000, so why did “they” decide not simply scale that up?
My initial thought on those, by the way, is that that is a possible long game and ACA is a plausible opening move.
Chaz
Nice little bit of acrobatics! This kind of extremism and to this degree in politics is unique. I would go further and say racism is alive and well… and I grew up under the apartheid regime so is looks and smells familiar. I do not believe the democrats would ever go to these lengths if the situation were reversed. Seems to me this is bad politics as the taliban republicans already no they cannot win the argument at the ballot box or they would have won the last election. This is a classic case of an argument in its death throws. In polls people may be against Obamacare because they have been brainwashed to fear one or two small issues in it that have been blown out of all proportion and or simply lied about. When the bill is broken down and people are asked about each portion neutrally them overwhelmingly like it. So its just good branding and fear mongering by republicans yet again that has us where we are. Is it a good act… is any law ever… probably not. But it is the law and given Supreme Court approval. So why not work to make it better. Frankly I’m a single payer advocate anyways but hey ho…
RJ
Thomas Lord:
Yes, his points were that (1) the private insurance industry is mostly a dead weight on the economy, providing negative value compared to alternatives and (2) the effects of firing most of the private insurance workers could be mitigated by (a) giving them generous severance/unemployment and/or (b) actually creating jobs for them to transfer into (preferably the latter, but the former would still be more efficient than the current system). Instituting a single payer style alternative, firing them, and just cutting them checks would be more efficient than today–you get the benefits of the cheaper system plus prop up demand. Giving them other, productive jobs would be the best.
Couldn’t there be some sort of freeze on private insurer equity to preserve the investments of pensions, then the government could take them over and deal with them after the fact? The arrangements aren’t immutable–something has to be possible.
I may have missed something, but that page doesn’t say anything about how long each system took to build–just that they were introduced province by province, with the central government getting involved at some point and formalizing it to speed up adoption and provide additional funds. If the US federal government were to be involved from the start, I’d guess it could be done quite rapidly. A few years at most.
Of course, anything like this has no political traction right now, even if its somewhat popular among the citizenry.
reslez
Obama already exempted Congress and its staffers from Obamacare. Breitbart says:
The latest House CR will remove the special exemption from ObamaCare the Obama Administration gave to members of Congress and their staffs.
When ObamaCare passed in 2010, Sen. Chuck Grassley won approval for an amendment that would require members of Congress and congressional staff to enroll for health insurance through the ObamaCare exchanges. Because of this provision, the federal government would no longer by able to pay the 70+% of premiums it covered for members’ and staff’s health insurance. The Obama Administration issued a waiver to this rule early this year.
The narrowly drafted CR set to be voted on by the House Monday afternoon would block this waiver. If approved, members and their staff would have to enroll for health insurance through the exchanges, which are set to open on Tuesday.
Thomas Lord
To me, this seems naive. It is a logistical impossibility. None of the people who are expert in building and running large organizations would agree to this. The unintended consequences would overwhelm what you’re attempting to do.
For example, let’s suppose that on a given day the president signs into law something that, at some date certain, will force insurance companies to cease operations (and promise checks to laid off workers).
That is the first day on which the gov’t will be permitted to start building the single payer system — a very large new bureaucracy or else a huge increase in size to an existing one. Even if an existing bureaucracy is expanded, there will be months if not years needed to sort out new policies for this operation’s expanded duties. You’ll need lots of new employees. You’ll need months or years to develop training programs for those employees and then start doing the training. During this process you won’t yet be “live” so you won’t be getting much or any feedback about how well your new policies and new training work *in practice*.
Meanwhile, what’s going on elsewhere? The stock market will have tanked the insurers. God only knows what how the insurers’ investment funds will behave. For-profit healthcare providers will take a beating from investors. For-profit and non-profit alike will have to start planning for a massive shift in how they bill and what kinds of revenues they expect. There will be lots of layoffs coming down the pipeline that won’t be covered by gov’t supplied severance. Insurers may have no choice but to start laying people off early.
Pulling the plug on insurers and so abruptly forcing such a large change on provider business models will also have a multiplier effect, depressing real estate values in some regions, harming lots of small businesses, and so forth.
Who would agree to this? What congress would agree to that, regardless of party? How do you think citizens would feel about it? It’s a proposal that literally could not be passed for the good reason that it would almost certainly make a huge disaster.
You mean like TARP but much larger? And, OK, so now a bunch of pension funds suddenly have cash or treasury bonds instead of insurance stocks: where do they move that money?
That system was built over decades, starting by building small manageable pieces and then gradually assembling them into a national system. Insurer and health care provider business models didn’t get entrenched they way they are in the US economy. There was at no stage in the history of Canada’s system the kind of sudden massive disruption and overnight installation of a huge new bureaucracy such as you’re proposing here.
Several european countries *did* undergo massive disruptions as their healthcare systems changed. The need for reconstruction after the devastation of WWII was very helpful.
Don’t get me wrong: My best understanding is that in the long run a single payer system probably makes the most sense if it is possible to get to one sanely. The problem is that if you try to get from where we were in 2007 to a single payer system by, say, 2016 …. I just don’t see how you do it without creating a much bigger crisis than you started with.
Z
This is not about obamacare. This is about cutting ss benefits via the chained cpi. obamacare will not be altered. ss will get cut.
These threats to obamacare, of shutting down the government, and on defaulting on our debt are all bullshit. It’s all about obama and the republicans (principally boehner) working together to orchestrate this crisis … which they have done repeatedly in the past … so that they can both do what they want: which, in this case, is cutting ss benefits and hence pleasing their corporate sponsors … without paying a political or personal price for defying the wishes of the vast majority of the american people. Some might call that betrayal. I would.
Z
Jerome Armstrong
“If President Romney had passed this bill (and remember, it is Romneycare on a national scale), and Democrats were shutting down the government with the exact same bill, most people screaming about this would be justifying it.”
Of course, that’s the whole point that everyone looking at this rational walks away with (literally). Team ball. Switch sides; play it again same way. A bunch of tribalist retrogrades who only care about arguing, posturing, and pretending that they can sway the others that are turning away.
Of interesting note Ian, I don’t think the Democrats realize how weak a position they are in– mostly due to an echo chamber:
Poll: 44 percent of Americans blame Republicans, while 35 percent put more blame on President Obama and the Democrats in Congress. When the government shut down back in November 1995, 51 percent of Americans blamed the Republicans in Congress, while 28 blamed President Bill Clinton.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57605822/poll-americans-not-happy-about-shutdown-more-blame-gop/
Well, in both polls, 79% wind up choosing a side, so it’s not like the one’s not playing are gaining.
S Brennan
reslez, this is why Obama waived the law as applied to congress:
60% of bankruptcies are due to medical bills, 2/3rds of those filing for that reason had medical insurance at the time. The Heritage plan of 1993, AKA Obamacare, does nothing to arrest this development…in fact, read this, it’s from my part of the country..my COBRA runs out at the end of November, the BEST PLAN my company offers has a $10,000.00 cap, it’s grandfathered under the Heritage/Koch-Brother/Obama plan. So to the exchange I go…and this is the garbage on offer.
Submitted by teresa on Wed, 10/02/2013 – 2:08pm
Departments:
Department of Now It All Makes Sense
Tags: ObamaCare clusterfuck
The past couple of days I’ve heard constant talk of the deals people are getting on the Obamacare Exchanges, (when the servers are up, of course). $120/month premiums, $500 or less deductibles. All of this sounds like a great triumph of liberal social policy. And if that were the whole story, I would definitely agree.
However, buried in the slimy underbelly of all of it is the new paradigm shift that has been defacto, if not purposefully engineered by the law. That is, the plans on the Exchanges offer **drastically** thin provider networks. I know Lambert has talked about this, but I am not sure that he understood how bad it really is. I know I didn’t, and I have a degree in cynicism (aka Political Science). People may see this in the abstract and think, oh well, a few doctors will be left out. But what is happening nationwide and in my Seattle area is that the highest quality and most major research, teaching and cancer hospitals, as well as a large portion of the top doctors in areas are being left out of the in-network provider list in Exchange plans. As I’ve said, this is a paradigm shift in how health insurance works in our country. People think they are getting the same kinds of plans on the Exchanges that they’ve always gotten through work or the individual markets. They. Are. Not.
To bring the issue into sharp focus, here is a list of MOST of the hospitals in the Seattle area that are OUTSIDE OF the NETWORK on the Exchange plans offered by Premera, our only Washington Blue Cross affiliate:
Swedish Hospital (major Seattle Hospital with branches all over town and in suburbia)
University of Washington Medical Center (Our teaching hospital)
Providence Hospital (another major hospital)
Harborview Medical Center (Major trauma center affiliated with University of Washington. People all over the state are flown to this hospital for trauma treatment.)
Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (our Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center hospital).
Veterans Medical Center
I do not have a grasp of how many doctors in private practice have been dis-included, but I do know that no doctors at Polyclinic are included either. Polyclinic is a large Seattle area clinic, known for its rock-star doctors.
I’m finding a similar situation from Bridgespan, which is the Exchange plan offered by Regence (our Washington Blue Shield affiliate). However, I cannot reach a person on the phone to confirm. When I called the number on the Bridgespan web site, the person I reached had no idea why I called him. He forwarded me to “Seattle Customer Service,” which turned out to be one individual’s voicemail. Figuring if she got back with me at all, it would be days, I gave up.
At first, I thought, well, if a person is desperate they can just go to an in-area, but out-of-network provider. However, there is a separate copay-coinsurance and deductible system for out-of-network providers. Out-of-network deductibles and copays are typically at least twice as high as their in-network counterparts, and they are not subject to cost sharing subsidies. In addition – and this is the greatest travesty – the law appears not to have regulated spending caps for out-of-network providers. Thus, the plans on Premera Blue Cross have an UNLIMITED out-of-pocket maximum for out-of-network providers. (Link to the Premera silver plan) Translated this means if you have emergency out-of-your-very-thin-network care needs, your cost burden is apparently UNLIMITED. And assuming that you can afford to pay an unlimited cost, none of what you paid applies to your deductible, coinsurance or out of pocket maximum once you get to your home network. This all flies in the face of Pelosi’s justification that Obamacare would stop people from contracting medical emergencies they can’t pay for. And of course, Obamacare cut funding to subsidize emergency care for the poor.
One of the issues this law was sold on was that it would eliminate medical bankruptcy for extreme care needs. However, in the Seattle area, none of the in-network Premera plans (and Regence/Bridgespan pending) have in-network hospitals offering bone marrow transplants. And as far as I can tell, only one of the hospitals offers organ transplants, but I haven’t gotten to researching if the doctors who do those transplants at that hospital are in-network providers. In-network providers exist for basic cancer or heart care treatment, however with the especially thin provider network, this care will likely be defacto rationed, as not enough providers are available to offer the care. I could go on, but you can fill in the blanks, I’m sure. People who need accelerated care may have no choice but to go to an out-of-very-thin-network hospital. If they do, because of the unlimited out-of-pocket maximums, I believe their cost exposure will be nearly as unlimited as if they had no insurance at all.
Also, as we all know, more and more companies are dumping people onto the Exchanges. As the subscriber list on the Exchanges grow, because of the radically thin provider networks, the wait times will also grow even longer. The Republican boogie-man of rationed care may very well become real — and for an increasing number of people, not just we poor sops who have been on the individual market or without insurance all along.
“Progressives” should be screaming. This should be front page news. The equivalent of Code Pink should be camping on the DC doorsteps and at every capitol building in our country. But the brilliance of this horrifying aspect of the law is that because the “progressive” grass roots love Obama or are otherwise living in denial, they remain silent. Worse yet, they sometimes cheerlead this policy travesty, saying it’s “cost-cutting”. It makes insurance more “affordable”. For the last time, health insurance is NOT health CARE. Are they so naive that they don’t realize that this change is the beginning of the destruction of the individual market as a place to get much care at all?.
But off my soap box. If you have decent coverage and are thinking of switching to a ‘cheaper’ Exchange plan, please do some detailed research into the provider network first. Don’t just look at premiums/copays. And please tell your friends and family to do the same.
And I invite you to research the travesties of your local Exchange provider networks as I have, and post them in the comments. Also, please write your newspaper, your Congressperson, or on your blog and share the same.
Thanks for your ear. Sorry in advance for my typos .
http://www.correntewire.com/drastically_thin_provider_networks_on_obamacare_exchange_plans
Gaianne
Thomas Lord–
Nice strawmen. Nice defense of parasites. Very good.
–Gaianne
BlizzardOfOz
To add to Gaianne’s comment. If the economy is such a house of cards, that merely disrupting the income stream of parasitical rentiers is enough to bring it crashing down, then isn’t that the bigger problem? Better to bring it down by concerted action, than to wait for it to be brought down by a bond vigilante, or some external shock.
But then, this discussion is mostly academic, isn’t it, as long as the brain-dead electorate keeps voting overwhelmingly for the Demublican party. The parasites will suck the host dry, then auction off the corpse’s body parts.
Thomas Lord
The ACA’s partial answer to the problem of rent extraction is a rent cap imposed on premiums (the bit where some people have gotten rebate checks on their premiums).
I think that ACA doesn’t do anything to limit insurer’s taking interest on the float when it might make more sense to use that money to reduce premiums.
With a less divided government I don’t think it’s far fetched that ACA can morph towards something closer to a single payer system in a series of incremental steps.
+ expanding medicaid and medicare eligibility
+ drug patent reform
+ allowing the gov’t to negotiate on drug prices
+ using gov’t to incentivize / accelerate shifts to pay-for-outcomes / salaried models
If eventually there is a mass defection from private insurance to a single payer alternative then, boom, it’s done.
More likely: if that defection from private to public is seen to be blocked at some point along the way, then at that time we can look at what is going on in the markets that block it and decide what to do about it.
One might have the question “Why bother with ACA at all? Why not just gradually expand medicare and medicaid and take those other steps? Why bother to reform the private insurers?”
The problem is that we needed ACA reforms like the elimination of lifetime payout caps, elimination of sex discrimination, a rent cap on premiums, and elimination of discrimination against pre-existing conditions — or at least this is the thinking behind ACA.
Without those reforms, expansion of the single payer system would incentivize insurers to hoard all of the lowest-risk people they can enroll, and to push the highest risk and most expensive people onto the single payer system. That would leave private insurers using their buying power to drive healthcare prices (and their own margins) up while at the same time just passing all the biggest bills on to taxpayers.
S Brennan
File under: “Who Do You Think You Are Kidding”
Instituting a single payer style alternative…It is a logistical impossibility. – Lord Thomas
None of the people who are expert in building and running large organizations would agree to this. – Lord Thomas
Except the USA did with Medicare, SSI…and ALL the industrial nations have done this…so there’s that detail, Only America..And Only now. So much for impossibility, perhaps the US leadership/Democrats have become weak wristed nellie’s as you claim, but that’s different from “impossible”.
Now “lord”, to your second speculation, name [actual names] your panel of “expert[s] in building and running large organizations”…who claim to be superior to all others and yet, too incompetent to actually get the job done? So far, the only impossibility you have put forth, is that which you claim, “experts who have done it, say it can’t be done”
Ian Welsh
Ok, enough. Single payer is a solved problem. If you actually do single payer, you don’t allow insurers to pay for services covered by the single payer program – they can only do top up insurance.
Single payer is one of the easiest solutions in the universe, because it’s just a billing solution. Canadian hospitals have a room where the billing is done — US hospitals have billing wings.
Again, you just roll Medicare out to everyone.
Let me be real clear here: Single payer costs less, is easier to implement than the ACA (by at least a magnitude) and produces better outcomes.
The cost control in ACA is not nearly as effective as in a true universal system (hint: for one, true universal systems don’t make it illegal to bargain for drug prices). It is easy to do administratively. The ONLY issue with it is that it does get rid of a bunch of jobs of people who were providing not ZERO value, but negative value, who were making money by denying health care to people who needed it. Those people should be taken care of, for sure, and in a polity which cared enough about people to move to single payer, it’s even imaginable they would be.
Don’t play the expert card with me. As long as I’ve been a blogger I’ve regularly out-predicted the vast majority of the experts, precisely because I am NOT paid to be wrong in the right way. American health care experts are funded, by and large, by people who do not want true universal health care.
Thomas Lord
You misunderstand me if you think I’m saying that ACA is, in the long term, a better solution than single payer. My comments are about the logistical (and fiscal) difficulties of making systemic changes.
However, my comments are also calm, don’t involve name-calling, personal insult, or ridicule, and so they are obviously out of place. Sorry to bother everyone.
S Brennan
Lord Thomas, the logic you employ is…to say the least, a bit wobbly when you say.
“my comments are also calm, don’t involve name-calling, personal insult, or ridicule, and so they are obviously out of place.”
Otto Adolf Eichmann was considered an eminently calm, agreeable man who not known to have raised his voice with family or co-workers. He spoke Hebrew and was well read, he also:
“was charged with the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe.”
So to be clear, I am not calling you a Jew killing Nazi.
But to claim that remaining calm while putting forth irrational arguments that contradict decency holds no cache with me. Nor with the Israelis of the early ’60’s, who were unimpressed with Eichmann for “calmly” going about the business of killing Jews in a very “reasonable” and “logical” manner. Apparently, good manners gets you only so far when the victims of injustice lose their “calm” when facing the perpetrators of crimes.
And please note, everything the Nazi’s did was legal under German law…and still I call them crimes. Obamacare/Romnycare/Gingrichcare/HeritageCare is legalized extortion…I don’t care how “calmly” it is advocated for, or carried out.
Formerly T-Bear
Not a great depth of maturity being shown here of late, particularly towards opinions and observations not having the kewl cohort’s blessing. Please say your piece and let it stand on its own merits. Some readers are capable of discerning whatever the substance is and don’t need the PC posse to protect from possible progressive unorthodoxy, thank you just the same. It doesn’t hurt to keep the comments short as well.
S Brennan
Formerly T-Bear, you are, exactly, what you complain about. Your post above being the exemplar of that. That said, the idea that you have authority, or can stand as an arbitrator disinterested/or-otherwise can be easily disproven…so who are you trying to fool?
Celsius 233
I’m with T-Bear; grow the hell up!
Lord Thomas indeed; how rude and snarky.
S Brennan
A pretentious nom de plume has always been the subject of ridicule…that you would call it “off the table” is humorous and without merit.
Perhaps, you should seek employment with Obamacares-less, they are publicly funded advocates…one of whom I met Friday, not her kind of work, she has a STEM education, but she needs to pay the bills, so she shills for Obamacare on blogs.
So Lord Thomas, is your real name Thomas Lord…as C233 & FTB claim? Don’t want to reveal yourself to the public, I understand, I am the same way, just send Ian a note and if your name really is Thomas Lord he can vouch for you.
Formerly T-Bear
@ S Brennan
How utterly jejune, nearly 7th grade material.
S Brennan
Hmmm…T Bear, anybody who reads the thread will see only two actors that whose comments are restricted to insult alone, yours and c233. This isn’t the first time you and T-bear have come on thread for the sole purpose of insult. Again you are EXACTLY what you claim to despise…and rightly so
And yes, when a man with a pompous name, declares the world flat innumerable times…and with absolute certainty, he deserves to be mocked. Yes, I understand you pretend that silly views that do serious harm should treated with utmost respect…in order to deliver what you think is insult.
But we still need to resolve the problem:
Lord Thomas, is your real name Thomas Lord…as C233 & FTB claim? Don’t want to reveal yourself to the public, I understand, I am the same way, just send Ian a note and if your name really is Thomas Lord he can vouch for you.
Formerly T-Bear
@ S Brennan
You have obviously received a near fatal to fatal dose of the cheeto dust that did in morroco bama. So sad. Can you not do better than that last, like a five year old going ña, ña, ña. I second Celsius’ grow up comment.
Celsius 233
S Brennan
October 7, 2013
Hmmm…T Bear, anybody who reads the thread will see only two actors that whose comments are restricted to insult alone, yours and c233.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And of course; you don’t see your own insults cast at any who disagree with the great and pompous S. Brennan?
You dominate a thread and and can’t take the heat when said character faults are pointed directly at the source; you?
Your childish, defensive, inability to see your own crap is the failing that stands out on this thread.
Are you capable of non-hyperbolic, reasonable, criticism to your posts?
It would appear not.
Maturity is not a relative term; it is, or, it is not.
Respond with considered comments or bow out and go away.