I want healthcare not health insurance. Insurance is me betting on whether I’ll get sick/injured or not and need to use it. At its core, Insurance is a hedge against uncertain loss. The problem is with health there will always be loss. We are all guaranteed to require medical assistance at some point in our lives. Unlike car or home insurance where there is always the possibility that we will not need to get a payout because we may never have a car wreck or have damage done to our homes. Your personal health is not something anyone should be betting against.

People shouldn’t be forced to purchase health insurance from private entities, but we should provide health care for those who need it. Having people go broke, and lose everything because they didn’t see cancer coming is not only sad but cruel as well. I absolutely see a need for single payer health care. I would gladly pay slightly more in taxes to make sure others are never forced to choose between the rent and the doctors. I’ve been there and it’s a horrible place to be.

When I was first diagnosed with Graves` Disease I did not have health insurance. Mark was working but his employer did not provide dependent insurance for their employees. I was too sick to work and we couldn’t afford to buy insurance. Because it was prior to the affordable care act, I also couldn’t qualify for medical assistance. We racked up quite a debt in medical bills and eventually had to file for bankruptcy because we just could not handle the debt. That was just over seven years ago and we are just now starting to get our credit back on track. In our early & mid-forties.

Single payer healthcare would prevent this exact same type of scenario from occurring for many others. I definitely don’t believe we should get rid of private insurance all together but I do believe we need to make sure that it’s not the only way one can get health care.

I read through this list and the parallels between it, and the current state of our country lead me to be very fearful indeed.

Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt recently wrote an article about fascism (“Fascism Anyone?,” Free Inquiry, Spring 2003, page 20). Studying the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile), Dr. Britt found they all had 14 elements in common. He calls these the identifying characteristics of fascism. The excerpt is in accordance with the magazine’s policy.

Source: The 14 Characteristics of Fascism, by Lawrence Britt, Spring 2003

This disgusts me so much.

The parents of a 15-year-old boy who died due to untreated diabetes and starvation have been found guilty of first-degree murder. Emil and Rodica Radita isolated and neglected their son Alexandru for years before his eventual death — at which point he was said to be so emaciated that he appeared mummified, a court in Canada heard on Friday. Alexandru, one of the Raditas’ eight children, reportedly weighed less than 37 pounds when he died in 2013 at their home in Calgary, Canada, following months of suffering due to untreated diabetes.

Source: Parents who let diabetic son starve to death found guilty of first-degree murder | The Independent

Today I read an article on Aljazeera which attempted to say that the treatment of Milo Yiannopoulos was an example of “Hypocrisy of Free Speech”¹. The author Rachel Shabi attempts to say that by the reactions of certain parties to the recent revelation that Milo had endorsed paedophilia Goes on to show that even free speech has it’s limitations.

Free speech in our constitution however guarantees that you may say what you like without risking being jailed for it. The constitution does not guarantee that your peers, employers, or others will not react to it in a manner that you dislike. Your employer’s are free to fire/hire you based on what you speak freely. Your peers are free to endorse or chastise you for it, and all are free to disassociate with you because of the words you have spoken. Free speech does come with those caveats.

So yes Rachel, Milo had consequences for his behavior, but no his free speech was not violated. He was and still is free to continue to say the things he has been saying. But we also have a right to chastise him for it, and his employers have a right to terminate his employment for them. While I will agree with you that being tolerant of hate speech in regards to minorities is repulsive, again those people are free to say what they wish. It’s just that for some reason more people tolerate hate speech then are willing to tolerate paedophilia. In my personal opinion both are sick and disgusting and promoting or tolerating either is truly horrible. I do empathize with your plight, it is sad that there are folks willing to pay people to write such hate filled articles and/or books. But that doesn’t mean that we can take away their right to say it.

This country was built on free speech it’s in our constitution for a reason, Free speech is needed in a democracy in order to debate what our laws should and should not be. Free Speech promotes free and open discussion within our congress. It allows the people the right to address their government with their grievances. Without free speech we could not protest when we disagree with the laws or with the way our elected official are behaving. Without free speech a private citizen running for office would have no way to criticize his incumbent opponent without fear of punishment. Of course there are a couple of limitations, for example one may not falsely yell “FIRE” in a crowded theatre, but those limits are there for a good reason.

There is a saying “I may not agree with what you are saying, but I will absolutely fight for your right to say it.”

So if you have a medical card and you visit planned parenthood. You present your medical card to them. Then any services you receive are looked at and if eligible, planned parenthood then sends a bill to the medical card provider. Just like any other insurance provider. Planned parenthood isn’t given a blank check, they can’t just spend tax payer funds on whatever they feel like spending them on.

So what they really mean when they say they want to defund planned parenthood, is that they don’t want them providing any medical services to low income people. Defunding them will not suddenly stop them from providing abortions. In fact, government funds can not be used for abortions and it has been against the law to do so since the passage of the Hyde amendment in 1976.

If they are successful in defunding planned parent hood. No one with a medical card will be able to use them for birth control, breast exams, gynecological check ups, pregnancy tests, prenatal care or any other perfectly normal medical services.

Personally I would hate to see woman have less choice about where they can receive health care.

Thing’s like this are seriously scary 

A US-born NASA scientist was detained at the border until he unlocked his phone

The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts.

The internet you know and love is a vast wild wilderness. Websites about anything and everything are everywhere, and you have easy access to them. You can reliably watch a youtube video one moment, then a video on some random obscure website the next. Net neutrality means you get access to all that content no matter what because all data is treated equally. You pay your internet service provider(ISP) then you have access to the great open internet.

We must first take a step back to understand why this is even at issue. For many, many years our media was curated for us. If we had a favorite television show or program we wanted to watch, we had to know which channel it was on, what time it would be playing and then we had to be there to watch it. With the advent of first DVR’s and then the internet this has changed and the way we consume media has changed. Many people are foregoing cable all together happy to stream their entertainment from Netflix, Amazon, Youtube and any number of places on the web. Add to that people who download media via torrent sites and file lockers and suddenly the cable companies are losing money. Slowly but surely we are seeing ISP’s launch their own streaming services in the hopes of competing.

So what does this have to do with net neutrality. Well with net neutrality we have access to any all data as the same speed. At the same time ISP’s are attempting to implement data caps. Think of it like your cell phone’s data plan. You get so much data a month to use and if you go over that you will be charged extra. ISP’s wish to have home internet work the same way with the same type of caps. The problem is, that it’s an artificial scarcity. Metering water makes sense because it is a finite resource, bandwidth however is not finite. Once they get data caps in place, they can then turn around exempt their own streaming services from those data caps, meaning you won’t go over your data limit if you use their own services. So then you have choice, you can watch media offered by your ISP which doesn’t count against your data cap or you watch media on a completely different website which does count against your data cap. Which would you choose?

A conflict of interest exists when those who provide the water pipes also provide the water.  It means that you can’t shop around for cheaper water suppliers because if your pipes suddenly burst, they may not be fixed because the water pipe supplier says “it’s not our responsibility you get water from that other company and they have to fix it. Only they can’t because they don’t have access to the pipes. When we lose net neutrality we’ll no longer be able to freely choose what we consume on the internet, our corporate overlords will decide what we should see and what we shouldn’t. And because in most places you only have one option for high speed internet we won’t be able to shop around for a better deal in the hopes of finding a more neutral internet.

Currently our neutral internet gives us all a voice. Everyone has a chance to post their thoughts, pictures and videos online. Net neutrality protects that right, it gives anyone a voice and allows us a freedom of speech that even our founding fathers would have been astounded by.

If you want to help Protect Net Neutrality you can support groups who are fighting for it.

• https://www.aclu.org
• https://www.eff.org
• https://www.freepress.net
• Set them as your charity on Amazon Smile

You can also write to your House Representative and senators as well as contacting the FCC

• http://www.house.gov
• https://www.senate.gov
• https://www.fcc.gov