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Post by helens on Feb 8, 2013 14:02:41 GMT -5
Don't forget the produce. When we have Salmonella outbreaks, because no one inspected the produce and it's cheaper to have disease-ridden pickers piss and crap in our lettuce to fertilize it cheaper, without a USDA to inspect or a CDC to test the source of the problem, exactly what do you think we will be eating?
You already know the rich are buying their produce/meat from local custom gourmet farms right now. The step up from Whole Foods. Corporate officers are not eating the stuff we buy at the grocery store today as it is. They don't mind that we eat rotting offal in our processed foods.
You want all inspections gone for public safety to 'cut costs and reduce the deficit'... so that our tax dollars work for paying subsidies and military contractors instead of the few benefits we get right now? Really?
Maybe you should think about this. Maybe you should think about WHY you are reading that the USDA is an unbearable cost. Who writes these articles and why are they writing them? What do we gain by that 'cost cut' as a nation, and what will we lose? THINK about it.
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Post by texaswoodie on Feb 8, 2013 16:05:29 GMT -5
The link I posted does not have anything to do with the safety of food. It described resturants and supermarkets having to put nutrtional labels on food which will cost the consumer even more money than it does now. It is a direct result of the most hideous bill ever passed by our government.............ObamaCare
All that typing for nothing........
Curt
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Post by Toad on Feb 8, 2013 16:43:53 GMT -5
When Obamacare passed my health insurance rates went up. I was just getting started in a new job and signing all the new paperwork. When we got to medical insurance, the HR person was embarrassed. She said, rates used to be a lot lower. but due to the new healthcare laws we're all paying more...
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Post by helens on Feb 8, 2013 21:35:28 GMT -5
When Obamacare passed my health insurance rates went up. I was just getting started in a new job and signing all the new paperwork. When we got to medical insurance, the HR person was embarrassed. She said, rates used to be a lot lower. but due to the new healthcare laws we're all paying more... Toad, one thing I discovered about company health care policies is that the prices are dictated by the 'group' in the company. While I'm no Insurance underwriter so know little about their actual process, I do know that they base rates on the 'pool' of people in that group. That means that if most of the people in the group are in a high risk category due to age, infirmity, pre-existing conditions, etc, the costs PER PERSON goes up. Thus, my husband's company insurance policy is OUTRAGEOUS. They recalculate the rates every year, and there's a couple of Vice Presidents in the company that are well beyond the age of retirement but keep working, and no one plans to force them into retirement. If the company he worked for were relatively young, mostly male, healthy, and they had to pay little out for the premiums, the rates would be MUCH lower. I complain about the $20,000 policy, but I managed to ditch it already, since the Cafeteria Plan is renewed every year. We are paying far less now with an individual HSA policy. HSA means that you have a high deductible, that you contribute to yourself, and the insurance doesn't kick in til you hit your limit... in our case, $11,900 out of pocket before the insurance will pay $1. However, every dime you put into HSA is yours, and you can play the stock market with that $$ if you want to... but every penny you deposit is tax deductible. Beats giving the insurance company all that premium and not owning a dime of it if you are a healthy family that rarely goes to the doctor. Having the HSA means you pay all medical bills out of pocket til you hit $11,900, but you do get discounts from having the insurance, at the negotiated rate (lower than paying cash with no insurance). You may want to look into HSA if your insurance is outrageous, and your family healthy. Say your premium is $2000 a month. HSA premium is less than $400 a month. So you pay $400, sock $1600 TAX DEDUCTIBLE rest into your own HSA account, where you invest however you want to, and at the end of the year, you have $19,200 in your HSA account if you don't need to go to a doctor (we hardly ever do). That's your money, and unless something catastrophic occurs, you don't touch it, it just compounds and grows, and next year, you only pay the premium because your deductible is already covered in your HSA, and you need not pay another penny til you deplete it. Then your permanent insurance cost is $400 a month, barring a catastrophe. OR, you can just loading your HSA, tax deductible, and invest it in your favorite ETF/mutual fund to keep growing. It's YOUR money, not the Insurance companies, and if things get truly bad, say you get cancer, there's enough in that fund to cover years of cancer or a long term illness worth of $11,900 deductible. You may want to consider that as an alternative to letting the Insurance companies rip you off. I got real tired of that last year.
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Post by helens on Feb 8, 2013 21:42:27 GMT -5
The link I posted does not have anything to do with the safety of food. It described resturants and supermarkets having to put nutrtional labels on food which will cost the consumer even more money than it does now. It is a direct result of the most hideous bill ever passed by our government.............ObamaCare All that typing for nothing........ Curt You're right Curt, I got carried away on a parallel point. However, I DO like to know the nutritional content of my food, as well as ingredients. I want to know that things my children eat don't contain toxic chemicals, or are overloaded with saturated fats. I do not agree that it will cost a fortune, since every single ingredient is already listed on any processed food item that a restaurant or grocery store buys. That's been the law for decades. So all they have to do is add up the ingredients of whatever they make, combine them, and spit it back out again. If there's a cost, it's going to be for the cheap app someone can write to parse that info, apps that exist right now for cell phones, and which are FREE for almost every phone type. If I can find out the nutritional value of everything I eat on my phone right now for free, I can't fathom why a restaurant can't use the same little phone app, and type it on their menu in seconds. If they can't find a single employee to type that info out on in the time it takes to write the day's specials on a blackboard, they can pay a company $100 to add it to every item on their menu. What's that going to cost between menu changes? $.10 per diner? That'll break the restaurant, because they can't add $.10 to their entrees?
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jamesp
Cave Dweller
Member since October 2012
Posts: 36,559
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Post by jamesp on Feb 8, 2013 21:52:33 GMT -5
Helen,you are like the smartest person i have ever known.
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Post by helens on Feb 8, 2013 22:05:39 GMT -5
Helen,you are like the smartest person i have ever known. Awww, what a sweet thing to say!! But... I wish:). You wouldn't believe some of the areas I'm completely deficient in... for example, I can get lost in my own neighborhood, and have almost no sense of time. In so many ways, I admire people like you and others on the forum!!
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brent
fully equipped rock polisher
Member since November 2008
Posts: 1,316
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Post by brent on Feb 8, 2013 23:13:00 GMT -5
The corporations are fighting labeling so they can keep hiding how much GMO foods are being sold. Not one person ever deliberately looks for GMO food and there is only one reason for growing it and that's to put more chemical on it. You can not grow nutritionally dense high brix GMO food!
It doesn't cost anything extra to label a product as "GMO" or "contains GMO".
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brent
fully equipped rock polisher
Member since November 2008
Posts: 1,316
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Post by brent on Feb 9, 2013 9:16:23 GMT -5
Just another thing to add to the label "May Contain Glyphosate" and it probably does. If you want to reduse your health care costs, change the way you buy food.
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Post by rockpickerforever on Feb 9, 2013 10:53:42 GMT -5
RE, insurance refunds
It's called the "Affordable Care Act" (now there's a new oxymoron!), and in California anyway, the ratio is 80/20. Eighty percent spent on policyholders, twenty percent on administration costs. We received a letter last year, saying that my husband's insurance company, Anthem, was not in compliance with the rule, and that policyholders would be receiving either a rebate, or a premium reduction for any future premiums.
They said a rebate was to have been given to "the employer or group policyholder" by August 1. Well, we never heard anything about it after that. Months later, I called his employer (to see if a rebate was ever sent to them), who told me the rebate was only being given to holders of "qualified policies," whatever that means. (All the employess had Anthem, but were able to choose from various policies.) If it was based on the cost of the insurance, it should have qualified as he has had the most expensive policy with the best coverage. When I tried to find out more about it, I got nowhere. I called Anthem, and after jumping through the standard hoops on their phone computer, and waiting a half an hour, I got stonewalled. The guy went into a circular loop, that I am sure they are well practiced in. I gave up, which I am sure is what they expect you to do.
And you can kiss your high deductable goodbye. My understanding is deductables will be limited to a measly $2000. There goes your savings on that! Lower decuctables means higher premiums.
GET REAL! We already spend about 35% of our income for medical/health insurance, co-pays, and prescriptions. I don't know about the rest of you, but $20K, or even the reduced $14K, is nowhere near close to doable. FYI, not everyone makes $200K a year and can afford to pay those kinds of beans! Jean
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WarrenA
fully equipped rock polisher
Member since November 2003
Posts: 1,530
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Post by WarrenA on Feb 9, 2013 12:08:23 GMT -5
Not once in my life has insurance ever gone down. Even in years when I had no claims on my health policy the next years price still went up.
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Post by helens on Feb 9, 2013 12:31:29 GMT -5
Jean, don't give up til you get an answer!! Try writing a letter, then copying it via email and sending it to their billing dept. THEN call some more. Consider that the person you are talking to when you get to the end of the hold may be a $8/hr part time college kid who doesn't care... ask if his Supervisor is available, and don't give up til you get an answer. If you are owed money, you should be getting that money!! It sounds like you have a shady insurance company trying to hang on to their profits. Another example of how the 'corporations are people' and can try to screw you. Have you tried dealing with ATT when they mess up your bill yet? Obamacare rates kick in in Jan 2014. It's not HERE yet. This is the time of maximum pain that the Insurance companies started inflicting to try to get Obamacare overturned. I have no idea what the House can or will do to eliminate the most critical provision of Obamacare between now and Jan 2014, or how they will negotiate the affordability part away before then, but THIS is what you will be paying for Insurance in 2014 if you can hang in there: Based on the 'poverty line'. As I recall, poverty line is $24,000 a year for a family of 4. $15,500 for a family of 2. That means that for a family of 4, 400% of the poverty line is just under $100,000 a year, and according to that chart, the total annual insurance will be a MAX of $8,379. Looking at the chart, if there's 2 of you, and you make $62,000, your maximum insurance cost will be $5,537. Here's the Federal Poverty Chart: www.familiesusa.org/resources/tools-for-advocates/guides/federal-poverty-guidelines.htmlSo unless Republicans manage to take away the 'Affordable' part of Obamacare this year during the squeeze the last drop of blood from the middle class deficit battle, in 2014, your premiums are going DOWN.
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