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But the audits very rarely touch beneficiaries... this is mainly because the reimbursement process isn't a flat/per service rate -- there are a host of modifiers and formulas that actually become checks. The actual beneficiary is just one factor - and the actual function of CMS cutting checks doesn't really happen on a "per beneficiary" basis. In effect, it's pointless in the reimbursement schema to loop in a beneficiary. By the time an audit gets down to that level, you're already screwed. The house of cards in a fraud instance will inevitably collapse well before you get to the level of a beneficiary's complicity mattering.
I'ts an interesting question, probably dependent upon subjectivity. I have a half-aunt whose father tormented my grandmother and mother, after which the aunt tormented my mother and robbed money from my grandmother's estate. My mother, being a better person than I, worked it out with her. If I found out right now that she was in the state your relative was in, I'd turn her in instantly. I would also admit, again, the subjectivity and small-mindedness of it. But I'd do it.
For neighbors, or other folks, it would depend on the level of crime, really. A judgement call. But there is definitely a line where I would turn someone in for theivery, I just haven't had to make such a call to this point.
Well, if you DO legalize pot... someone has to actually be the point-of-sale, right?
Voila... jobs problem solved.
They deny it because, again it's not that big of an issue, the attempts to curb voter fraud would actually hurt voter turnout, and [sarcasm]surprisingly[/sarcasm], disproportionately against the people that tend to vote liberal.
I'd LIKE to believe you're joking here. So I will.
Proof!
Wikipedia says it costs around $30k per year to incarcerate a person, so paying them less to remain a dependent of the state at home would actually be a better outcome, wouldn't it? Plus, they wouldn't spend 24 hours a day around criminals, which presumably would reduce recidivism. And, you know, yay for liberty and stuff. I suppose employment opportunities at prisons would drop though. Hmm.
Tell that to Tricky Dick. Were he alive.
It's more proof than whatever your obsession with Treder's Williams error is trying to convey.
What? Its an impression. There isn't any point in arguing about an impression.
I think its funny for a guy who describes himself as a baseball historian to not know that Ted Williams was a fighter pilot
who saw action in a shooting war. Its kinda central to the whole Ted Williams was the real life John Wayne thing, right?
That, coupled with Treder's abosolutely doctrinaire Joy Behar-like world view, strikes me as ironic and sorta humorous.
Well, we know how much you promote tying baseball in with off-topic stuff and politics on BTF, so, I guess it makes sense.
My impression of the people I know like this is that they mostly don't vote, the ones who do vote tend to vote for one party or the other based upon whether they hate minorities or not...
Keep in mind that not all of them would quietly settle down to a miserable life on the dole. Many of them would find other criminal enterprises since we're dealing with a group that's, on average, pre-disposed to crime anyway. Low intelligence, low future time orientation, low education, and often coming from deeply dysfunctional families. The Drug War is essentially a contrivance for keeping America's lumpenproletariat locked up; it's not ideal, but it probably beats living next door to those people.
It cracks me up too. It's the perfect combination of arrogance and ignorance that creates comedy.
I think that system was tried and didn't work out too well.
One problem, of course, is that's also an argument for locking up a lot of other people. Gun owners would be one example - I was faintly amused/horrified to read about the number of cases where a stray bullet from an accidentally-fired gun hits someone, or came close to hitting someone, next door.
I have real ill will towards him, and made a point to Congrats! him when his beloved SF Giants finally took the WS.
Hang on boy. Work day's almost over.
Not really. Unless you can make a case that gun owners, or whatever group you're discussing, share the negative traits of our lumpenproles AND are violating the laws put in place to snare them.
Mind you, I'm not necessarily supportive of the Drug War, and given my druthers would probably end it. But my economic position is such that any negative consequences wouldn't really affect me. I don't think that'd be the case for many working and middle class folks though.
I have no problem with you calling Treder a nitwit for not knowing that Williams saw combat.
I can't, just point to my experiences. Not saying that everyone is that way or anything, but in my history, I see a lot like that. I am former military and know a lot of former military who are on disability(it's very easy to get) The military is weighed heavily with Republicans/Right wingers/Tea partiers. Some of the same people collecting disability, are also the same people who like to point out to the leaches on the government(in my experience) I pointed out earlier my sister (also who collects disability) who has all her life taken the easy way out whenever possible, but is also the only member of the immediate family who is a Republican. She hasn't had a 40 hour a week job in years, when she does get a job, she routinely calls in sick(for my family, I can count on one hand the number of sick days me and the other 4 siblings use in an average year) or take the job strictly for it's benefits(her newest job, first in months, is to work at the local university so she can get discounted classes).
There isn't proof, there is just my anectdotal evidence. But again, my point is that it's not just a one way street of people taking strictly being Dems. I would accept that by the definition that Romney gives of 47% are takers, that a majority of those are probably liberal/democrat, but it's not going to be a massive percentage difference between the two parties, especially when you consider that the 47% included disability, Social Security, medicaid, unemployment insurance etc.
Same here. I respect the heck out of Steve, but that was a hell of an odd blip in his field of knowledge. All sorts of not-even-casual fans who probably couldn't name 10 Hall of Famers if their life depended on it probably are at least vaguely aware that Ted Williams flew in combat during the Korean War.
But, yeah, I'm with Ray on that. Harkening back to the matter strikes me as not only excessive but also a poor reflection upon oneself. I mean, I vaguely recall Voros, about four years ago, misreading some listing of former batting champions & identifying someone from the late '30s whom no one had ever heard of as being in that company. Beating him over the head with that would make me look like a tiresome axe-grinder.
Besides, it's more fun to tweak him over "I Am the Fly," instead.
I've enjoyed my life much better since I've tried to give up grudges. I try to not remember who says what at me outside of one thread to another. No reason to hold the emotional response given to someone in one thread, and carry it over to another thread. Outside of maybe half a dozen posters, I couldn't begin to name where someone came down on me or with me on a particular argument. I know some posters tendencies, but I can't remember who was "mean" to me in one thread to another thread. Within the thread, sure, but carrying the animosity over, just seems a waste of time.
The thing I find funny, if the quoted part above is the limit of Treder not knowing Williams faced combat, I'm not sure how that could be held against him. The quoted part above specifically states.
That seems rather tame of a comment to get someone in an uproar about.
I wouldn't really say that. I mean sure the story is he flew combat, but Treder likes to think of himself as a historian, and would rather have evidence presented that he in fact flew in combat missions, than take the narrative that has been going around for years, at face value. (The narrative is Babe Ruth called his shot, ask a large portion of people, and they are going to say that is true without a moments hesitation.... it doesn't mean they are right, just that they have heard the narrative.)
I'm Irish.
You know what Irish Alzheimer's is? You forget everything but the grudges.
*tfbg9 holds left side of chest, staggers about the room, like Redd Foxx in Sanford and Son.
But you're missing the point Ray. He didn't really fully acknowledge it. He channelled Bones from Star Trek.
"I'm a baseball historian! Not a military historian!" Like you need to be Steven F*cking Ambrose to know Ted was in combat.
Steve's pomposity only digs himself an even deeper hole.
Bah, whatever I guess.
Well, Williams was an unusual case among baseball players, in that he was the subject of what I presume was a best-selling biography, & his death not too horribly long ago provoked all sorts of ruminations on his being the personification of American Manhood, or something to that effect, his military record very much included. That gives his life more impact on the general psyche than just about anyone else's I can think of as far as baseball greats are concerned.
Or so it seems to me; I'm certainly not privy to the impressions of the average American.
My plan ... it's working!
(Irish as well, at least on my father's side. And half of my mother's.)
"Irish as well, at least on my father's side. And half of my mother's"
Well, there's hope then. : )
I just unblocked you. Pistols at dawn?
I have no idea how I wound up with, AFAIK, no Catholics in my immediate family tree (that I know of) ... but I guess Irish aren't all Catholics, stereotypes aside. (I mean, obviously they aren't -- Ian Paisley, come on down!) I don't even know what part of Ireland my great-grandfather came from, though I do know what Alabama infantry regiment he fought for in the Civil War. (It helps that it's on his gravestone, of course.)
Well, it's a bigger problem than just Ray's relative. Lax eligibility and enforcement standards lead to government resources being diverted toward those that don't need them, leaving less money for those deserving and other governmental needs, while undermining the credibility of the various aid programs. Can't keep doing that forever while running up trillion dollar deficits. Eventually, you run out of other people's money.
I'm a historian, and I didn't know (at least, not such that I would be confident saying it was the case).
Never mind, I guess.
Ask me at noon. (can't remember Woody's line from Love and Death)
gef, if I had to guess, you're probably what they call Scotch-Irish. Google it up, if you don't already know this.
Well, it's kind of funny that Steve seems to have spent some time trying to verify whether Williams flew combat in Korea, but bizarrely was unable to. I'd have thought such a verification would take about 90 seconds. Steve, was someone posting under your account that day? :-)
Actually, though, per the above exchange Steve never actually makes an error. He doesn't say Williams did not fly combat in Korea; he simply says he couldn't confirm it.
Since the conventional wisdowm that Williams flew combat matches with the facts, my guess is that someone, somewhere along the line told Steve it wasn't true, and Steve went with that before he could verify it.
I can see have some fun with Steve over this in a good natured manner, but, again, I think it is wrong to bring it up constantly to beat him over the head with it. And concluding that this Says Something about Steve vis a vis his politics or pomposity is irrational.
Bah. "I stand instructed that Williams did indeed engage in combat service in Korea." That's good enough for me. His military historian/baseball historian comment is neither here nor there. He didn't double down on an error.
I strongly suspect you're right. My impression is that that's pretty common for people of Irish descent in the South (if memory serves, Andrew Jackson is a case in point), & in my case the ancestor in question first arrived in, I believe, Georgia, probably around the time of the Potato Famine. It's a description I'm familiar with, but I've never really looked into it; am Googling it even as I type.
And to think I've long harbored sympathy for the IRA. I'm a traitor to myself!
Re-posted in the hope that someone adopts this as their handle.
Well, it's not like reasons for doing that are in short supply, so I figured it was ok to pass on this one.
I would generally agree, but note that Treder's habit of calling people stupid, and other insults, merely because he disagrees with them is the likely cause of tfbg9 highlighting Treder's rather stunning lack of knowledge about Ted William's Korean War service record. A little more civility would do a lot of people good, as would not allowing the fixed positiions of the wholly unneeded Politics Thread to infect every corner of BBTF.
No. He only suggested that it should be in no way surprising that a baseball historian would fail to know of a central chapter in the bio of
argueably the 2nd most famous baseball player in history. That's all.
They have a real historical beef. But I don't support them.
BTW, are you familiar with the, umm, inside joke in the name of the old Irish punk band "999"?
As well you should be. You should go on a hunger strike, then forcefeed yourself.
Nope. I've always assumed it was from the UK equivalent of 9-1-1.
I havn't followed this thread, only clicked on it to see what direction it had taken for 300+ posts. Having known Treder personally for several years, been a guest in his home, etc, I can tell you he is among the most decent people you'll ever know. He's also affable, sanguine, engaging, polite, and a first class gentleman in every sense of the word. If he calls you stupid, you've probably gone above & beyond to earn that label.
Carry on.
Yes it is. But also, count letters in the alphabet...when you get to nine you've fallen on "I", go nine more and you get "R", go nine around again to "A".
Not sure if this was intentional, but all us cool drunk Irish punks used to think it was.
Updates
Apparently, he's gotten several Senators to assist and it's still ongoing ...
Nah, I've always been amused by this one. Treder, BAESBALL HISTORYIEN, is a particularly deserving target of mockery, but it'd be funny regardless.
Neat. Not a huge 999 fan, but "Homicide" is a great, great song; I always thought some pop metal band over here could've stormed the charts with a cover.
Bigot.
Yeah.
So what brand of beer did Babe Ruth prefer?
... but of course he didn't.
You can't have it both ways --
The dollars that get spent to hire more regulators (and create more regulations and people to carry them out) are the exact flavor of dollars 'wasted' on people like Ray's lazy family (kidding!)
In fact, without even getting into the plus/minus of real numbers about 'more rigid' eligibility and 'tougher' enforcement -- I'd argue that we already know the answer about which is more cost-effective... at least, if it's ultimately those 'trillion dollar deficits' you care most about.
Remember that those added costs for 'rigid standards' and 'tougher enforcement' are only going to be partially borne out by the programs themselves... Tougher enforcement means prosecution costs -- THAT adds to the trillions of dollars. Prosecution probably means corrections of some sort -- jail, probation, etc. Given that the cost of imprisoning someone for a year is roughly $30k -- and there's no conceivable way a person could get $30k of welfare (so far as I know, I'm willing to listen if someone can construct a legitimate scenario... with links to the actual programs and eligibility standards) -- I think we can already say it's that inevitably cheaper -- if it's really that 1 trillion in deficits we do care most about -- to live with Ray's relatives snagging unfair handouts rather than paying the increased costs of enforcement and corrections to deal with Ray's relatives.
Of course, it's not just Ray's relatives, and the argument that it is just not worth the trouble to spend the taxpayer's funds carefully should be a loser, too. Everything is always too big or too little to be worth the trouble of doing right. Not so.
Because? I'm all ears.
Bigot.
Considering a jig is a 3x4 British dance from the 16th century, I'm going to assume you're simply not being funny.
OK - but what do you mean by 'spend it carefully'... in other words -- is it better to deficit spend 1.1 trillion "carefully" or deficit spend 1 trillion "carelessly"?
It's about priorities... either you're going to live with skim and spend less on enforcement, or, you're going to spend more on enforcement.
Hell, even the free market goes along with this -- retailers absolutely account for skim in their budgets... and they all know full well that it's entirely possible to prevent skim entirely. However, they 'choose' to live with losing a few points off the margins to shoplifters and dishonest employees rather than spending more on surveillance, electronic monitoring, etc. Why? It's more cost effective.
Doesn't mean they turn a blind eye -- just means that it's cheaper to just accept the occasional kid pocketing a candy bar than it is to pay for a system to electronically inventory track every candy bar, additional personnel specifically to guard the candy bars, etc.
So, again... I ask the question:
What do you care more about?
Do you want to deficit spend 1.1 trillion to ensure that every last person getting a government check actually 'deserves' it.... or do you want to spend 1 trillion and live with some of Ray's relatives scamming the system?
Yes, this is a hoot.
No, really, it's not...
In the real world - this is how everything works...
Heck, my own company used to employ hundreds of proofreaders.... and it was almost impossible to find any instances of material published with typos. Now, in the digital age -- we publish a lot more stuff (and produce software based on that content, etc). We don't have any proofreaders on staff anymore.... and yes - you can certainly find typos in digitally published content more readily than you'd find in older, legacy content.
Ironically enough - our costs have gone up, but this is mainly infrastructure and systems spend -- but so have our revenues.
What's "doing it right"?
Fewer typos? Lower expenses? More revenue?
All three cannot be met simultaneously, so like every other human-built system on the planet -- we maximize what's most important (i.e., the sweet spot where typos don't cost customers, higher expenses correlate to a bigger rise in revenue... PROFIT!)
It's no different with government programs -- you can make any and all of them so tight that not a single nickel goes to someone that doesn't deserve it. But - it's a fallacy to think costs are going to drop because you do that, because enforcement and punishment isn't free.
Sooo... again... the question becomes a simple matter of what you care most about: Spending 1 trillion and letting go the punitive impulse against the ne'er do wells that are suckling off your dime, or, spending 1.1 trillion and blocking/punishing the ne'er do wells?
Concur.
In technology, the historic term for the concept is "The Engineer's Triangle." The engineer explains to management: look, there are three things I can optimize on any given project: quality, time, or cost. I can optimize only one of them if you want, and I can optimize any two of them if you want. But I cannot possibly optimize all three; it's simply impossible. So tell me which one or two of them you want to be the lower priority, and I'll get to work.
It hasn't changed, Paul's not being accused of being anti-american solely because Obama is a Dem, if Romney had been elected and Paul was giving this speech, the right-o-sphere would be screaming TREASON!!!!
In this case we need optimize just one: cost, and we can do this quite easily, by slashing 80% of the federal budget.
Congratulations, you've just acknowledged the fact that the trade-off choice is eternally unavoidable, and it isn't "a hoot."
The same analogy comes up in health care a lot. (time = access)
Of course - those 'costs' are relative thing, too... ask any short-sighted organization who has gone past year one of a say, sourcing their data center to a vendor and now finds themselves wondering why a whole host of hidden costs have shot through the roof even though they're no longer paying direct facilities and equipment costs nor a whole host of sys admin people!
Cutting near-term budget is easy - it's a job any idiot can do and frankly, it seems what most of today's idiots are employed in doing...
I've anecdotally noticed this as well but couldn't figure out why this does indeed seem to be the case. Your experience seems a perfectly sensible explanation. I think that sort of attitude has filtered down fairly rapidly too - my wife is an English professor and the number of absolutely basic typos she receives routinely would seem to indicate that *nobody* proofreads anything anymore.
I suspect it's a function of the pervasiveness of soft copy content replacing printed. In the print days, everyone knew that once it was printed, it could never be modified. Nowdays, fixing a typo (or making any other amendment) on a soft-copy document is a snap, so the concern for proofreading has atrophied.
Proofreading cost time... and one way or another - that's money.
Expect this trend to get even worse - not better... and by worse - I don't just mean 'proofing for typos'... We're starting to do a employ a lot of semantic disambiguation, classification and content generation software -- based on some really nifty machine learning next generation type stuff.
A lot of it is really powerful, actually - very neat stuff.... but it also makes some of the dumbest, most glaring mistakes you can imagine.
Mark my words - it's only a matter of time before you start reading (well, maybe... unless everyone's machine learning starts to gain self-knowledge and begins covering its tracks by hiding embarrassing stories!) news items about a history textbook that describes our first President as a west coast state that grows apples and has a city with a heroin-fueled music scene and strong coffee.
And here all this time I thought he was a Designated Pinch-Runner for Charlie Finley's A's. Who knew?
Proofread your posts man.
You get what you incentivize, and other than lip service, there is a little incentive for government to cut costs or expenditures, so it doesn't get done. It simply isn't true that it would cost more than it is worth to reduce wasteful or unproductive spending in all cases. Now that doesn't approach the 80% of the federal budget that Ray mentioned, but the federal government could easily tighten it's belt to save the ~2% of the budget that is at issue in the sequester.
Well, that will come, too... eventually, all the machine learning software will figure out that it gets paid the same amount regardless of quality of output.... which inevitably lead it to create a BBTF account... and then it will start posting here... and the wonderful history threads will be ruined by somebody going by the handle IBM What-u-say-son asking what Herb Washington has to do with the Nats bobblehead Presidents race.
But that's not entirely true...
Take Medicare reimbursement, for example... it's had plenty of mandates to cut costs and it has -- handling of reimbursement has largely been outsourced to various carriers who now handle processing of reimbursement claims from providers.... and - the 'cost' of processing those claims has gone down. Of course - Medicare's overall costs have skyrocketed because the carriers are rewarded based on, essentially, speed and efficiency. This has had the adverse impact of leading to more fraud -- the carriers are not auditors (nor would you want them to be) and they're also not doctors. So the 'cost' of the billing/reimbursement administration HAS gone down -- but the overall, longer term program costs have gone up and not just due to out-and-out fraud, but because the providers have certainly learned how the system works and have gotten better at modeling against it (i.e., we can safely perform more of mundane service X even if not strictly necessary because so long as we actually perform the service and code it properly, we'll get reimbursed for it).
One person's efficiency is another person's inefficiency and one person's short-term budget saving is another person's long-term exploding cost.
I've anecdotally noticed this as well but couldn't figure out why this does indeed seem to be the case. Your experience seems a perfectly sensible explanation. I think that sort of attitude has filtered down fairly rapidly too - my wife is an English professor and the number of absolutely basic typos she receives routinely would seem to indicate that *nobody* proofreads anything anymore.
Well, when spellcheck learns that "come over hear" isn't just as good as "come over here", many of those typos might be eliminated. American education has improved in many ways, but spelling isn't one of them.
Of course Morty will undoubtedly mark this down as one more example of elitist nitpicking, and find some 18th century dictionary to back him up, but whatever.
The proofer makes around $60K a year. The reprints cost over $20K. It seems the only thing "smart" people care to optimize is the budget, before the real world starts slapping it around.
Did you mean that literally or merely literally?
Yep, that's what Steven Pinker and Ben Yagoda are--men out of their time.
Between you and that I on the wall
EDIT: Or, in short: "Out, you babliaminy, you unfeathered, cremitoried
quean, you cullisance of scabiosity!" - Thomas Middleton, A Trick to Catch the Old One
(1608)
Actually, "Between you and I and the lamppost" is okay, since that's the standard old school variant that I've heard in every pool room I've ever been in. Add that last part and I'll call off my internal eye roll, at least until you say you're disinterested in continuing the conversation.
In Jeffrey Toobin's "The Nine," at one point Mario Cuomo is described as "The New Yorker" (as in, the magazine) instead of "the New Yorker" (as in, the guy from New York). So there's a damn good clue that particular book was "edited" by a computer, and not a person.
You keep wanting to pretend the game of life is only about shooting your cherries.
It doesn't matter who asserted it; the assertion is inane. It takes (erroneously) as a given that a massive, multi-trillion dollar suppression of wages is an accurate measure of value given and value received. Since it isn't, and it isn't close, Obamacare is simply a redistribution aimed at correcting the original theft of value. It's really not that hard to understand.
I agree with Ray absolutely. Corporations endlessly at the public tit need to begin to take full responsibility for their behavior, and they need to be told this in no uncertain terms.
It's not just skim. One problem with tougher enforcement is that it doesn't just catch the guilty. You end up throwing some needy innocents off the rolls as well. You end up throwing off people who need the benefits but have erred in failing to file according to all the trivial regulations, for example.
Wasn't Colmes a pleasant radio personality who was never taken seriously as a thinker by anyone, and surrendered any claim to relevance the minute he started cashing Fox's checks? I couldn't resist looking at the clip, and it's hard to figure why someone would put up with the kind of verbal abuse O'Reilly was dishing out. Being called a liar, being called contemptuously by your last name? It would be a low moment in anyone's career.
Carpentry's the same way, Steve. "Do you want it cheap, fast, or good? I can give you two of three".
392:
You keep wanting to pretend the game of life is only about shooting your cherries.
394. Morty Causa Posted: March 07, 2013 at 01:04 AM (#4382602)
Of course, I meant 391. Where are those damn proof readers?
Hey, if I tell you how to use the edit function, can you tell me what 393 is supposed to mean? What have you got in that ice cream cart that you're trying to sell? This is about the money, isn't it?
Proofreading is yet another form of elitist warfare that aims to preserve existing hierarchies by privileging one word over another. What part of this do you not understand?
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