Justice Clarence Thomas has secretly accepted luxury trips from a major Republican donors

Good find. When all the criticism is aimed at Clarence Thomas, the natural reaction of conservatives is to consider it a partisan attack and no corrective action should be taken. Finding a liberal justice example demonstrates this isn't just a tribal thing. SCOTUS has a problem with an appearance of impropriety if not actual corruption. Their credibility as a political institution is at stake. If they can't demonstrate they're beyond ethical reproach, their decisions will feel increasingly tyrannical to all the citizens who don't get to vote on them.

They can be impeached. Of course, the Republican House wouldn't ever start a process on Thomas no matter how bad it looks.

 

Supreme Court Did Review Case Involving Harlan Crow—Contradicting Clarence Thomas’s Claim
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarado...cting-clarence-thomass-claim/?sh=5bd532976c74

 

Receipts...

 

Hard (easy, sad) to believe that the Court presents a united front over **** this bad looking.

Breaking: Supreme Court announces 'We wear crowns now.' (The Onion)

Spoiler

 

Spoiler

 

So funny... cancun citing daily wire...

 

OK... Justice Sotomeyer had a book published Penguin Random House. Justice Gorsuch had a book published by HarperCollins. And Random House had a case in front of the Supreme Court. HarperCollins had a case in front of the Supreme Court.

In fact, many justices have written books. Most received big advances... Sotomeyer ($3M), Barrett ($2M).

Of course, your effort to deflect from what Thomas did isn't surprising nor effective. Are you arguing that all the justices should be removed? Sure, I am good with that. Are you arguing that SC Justices should get big book deals? I am OK with that too. I think there should be a higher bar of ethical behavior.

 

I really would like to know if health insurance premiums are up more than normal after the ACA.

It wouldn't make a difference to me, I am a big fan of the ACA but I am interested

 

I strongly believe @StupidMoniker gets a hard on discussing it.

 

The answer is, it depends. For some people, premiums went down. For some people, the government picked up the tab. For some people, premiums went up. The poorer and sicker the person, the more the ACA helped them. The wealthier and healthier the person, the more the ACA hurt them.

 

sorry / not sorry for my redactions and innuendo.

 

Yes, up for me, down for Andre. As per usual.

 

lol...to be truthful though he was on it like a fly on ****.

 

I haven't made a comment about the ACA far as I can remember. You better hope one of these renegade judges don't decide Viagra or Cialis is unsafe and shouldn't be FDA approved anymore. I think it'll be worst for you then me...

 

I don't know, and I think that healthcare is too interdependent to provide a definitive answer to this question. Did expanding coverage (increasing the number of consumers) help reduce healthcare costs? Did requiring minimum care (increasing consumption) help push healthcare costs up? It's likely that these factors had little impact overall and did not change the trend of rising healthcare costs in the US.

Healthcare is a unique industry with an infinite consumption and a constrained supply. If left to the supply and demand free market, costs would continue to rise forever and at a high rate. The only way to truly control costs is through capping, government control, and/or drastically increasing the supply.

 

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/04/politics/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-tuition/index.html
ProPublica: GOP megadonor paid private school tuition for grandnephew of Justice Clarence Thomas


This is INSANE

 

Yall know DC has among the highest per capita among cities and is the highest when treated as a state. The grease is incredibly thick in that triangle with people out to get theirs or get theirs by enabling their masters to get theirs.

Family entanglements with lobbyists/billionaires is the open loophole every branch uses so that they don't retire in shabby houses or live in bankruptcy from legal fees (as the Clintons flirted after their second term).

The human effect is incredibly strong as civil servants hold all that power, mingle among the highest rungs of society, with only a handful getting paid the salary of a low-level Google engineer.

If there was a show to describe this effect on a constant basis, it would be the early seasons of Billions, where a NY DA couldn't handle a billionaire without his personal family connections and would've been on a far lower socio-economic rung in the NY social circles if it weren't for his dad and wife. Plenty of these civil servants are the elite of elite institutions but money-wise it clearly doesn't add up when a tiktokker with 500k viewers can rake it in more.

My point isn't that we should allow this persistent ethical shitstorm to continue, but also recognize how much influence money plays and the public's personal whims for standards of accountability and responsibility doesn't match the temptations they take in daily. None of these justices will get rewarded or praised for the thousands of times they say no, but will get scrutinized and crucified for the (hopefully) few times they say yes.

Our expectations are a lot like athletes cheating in sports. You hate to see a player dope but you'd like it more when they perform and win "for you". The notion of getting caught is reserved for undesirables or villains on the other side, except not much is done to eliminate it entirely through stiffer penalties and enforcement. Short of an iron-clad conviction, you will stick with your team's guy until the very end. Post-conviction, they are losers who are evil, not representative of your cause, and need to be forgotten quickly.

The difference here is that no one watches the watchmen, but as a democratic society, the people have the time and several election cycles to make it happen if we really wanted to make it happen.

Just not right now or even the next time...

 

Vacations on a Super Less Fortunate Yacht?

 

Dude, you just don't have a ****ing clue here. I would suggest a reading list but i doubt you'd take it in good faith.

This is not the way insurance markets, particularly health insurance ones, work in theory or in practice. Whole books, careers, fields of study and hundreds of years of history indicate otherwise.

In theory - the reason why your "widgets" factory analogy fails is that unlike widgets, who the buyer is matters in insurance - and the incentives of the buyer and seller are severely misaligned , this and the fact that people are in general, bad at predicting inherently unpredictable risks has resulted in an industry thad basically can't exist without regulations.

Actually a great analogue to health insurance is pet insurance. Pet insurance is very lightly regulated in comparison, yet premiums are horrendously high, coverage is terrible relative to the cost of pet health care, and margins are still low. Because it suffers from the same inherent asymmetries - has nothing to do with Obamacare.

That's just the way insurance is and always has been (and why insurers make money off the float not the premium)

Blah blah blah, guy who repeatedly name checks the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (atlas shrugged screenplay fanfic, among other receipts) and more or less been " that annoying freshman seminar libertarian guy who keeps talking about how the post office is unconstitutional" for decades here, when not a blood and soiler anong other hata... and who doesn't appear to understand or even acknowledge adverse selection, moral hazard, and all the other vagaries unique to health insurance economics that the Pros from Dover talk about - has figured out the cause of all of his problems...

SPOILER - it's "The Democrats" and Obamacare, because of course it is.

This is usually the point in the rebuttal where you're supposed to pivot and say markets failing to work are a feature not a bug, meanwhile you go back to your government adjacent existence like Ayn writing angry letters to SSA about her late benefits checks in the preinformation age - if only she had a smart phone.