| On the new Role Playing group , health care, and libertarians |
[19 Nov 2009|09:32am] |
I met the rest of my new RP group yesterday. Everyone got accquainted. I'm pretty excited about this. I'm writing up my character's background now. It's 2,000 words and reads like bad fanfic but I'm working on it, I'm kind of new to this.
As for the group, Alex I already knew. He's cool. I actually kind of liked him (you know, like liked him), but personal stances on having children came up in a conversation, and it's jut better not to get involved at all, because a guy wanting kids 'of his own' really kills long-term relationship potential for me. Hopefully I'll find some one later who's cool with adoption, and of an older child at that. I feel kind of dumb thinking so far ahead when no one was even dating yet, but it seems foolish to even try when the things you want out of life are so fundamentally incompatible. And obviously, secretly hoping the other person changes their mind is a recipe for a world of self-inflicted misery.
ANYWAY.
So, Carol seems nice. Kind of quite but nice. I'll wait until we have a chance to talk more.
And the last guy, Ronny. He seems nice, too. Has kids and lives in Iwamizawa(?) with his wife. At first we were talking, and it was like, You're an atheist? Cool! Skeptic? Awesome! Fan of all the same podcasts as me? Great! Libertarian? ..... Yah. So I think I should TRY to not talk about politics, because obviously Libertarian is like, the exact opposite of Progressive! They're like hardcore republicans who want weed to be legal, as far as I can tell, and anyway, yeah, I need to try my best not to talk about politics. And y'all KNOW how hard that will be for me. You do. I am even now, resisting sending an email to him to continue a conversation that we kind of started having during the meetup. About healthcare, you know, topic of the year/week/day, and he initially stumped me by saying that the health insurance industry's profit margin was "only" about 3%
Well, I didn't know what to say, so I did some research, looking up financial info for various companies. While it's technically true, to say that Net Profit Margin would be about that level, it's also very disingenuous. The profit margins for the corporate retailers as a whole is typically around that level or slightly lower. Wal-Mart, Target, Amazon, all have profit margins around 3% and it's not just because of the current economy, that's typical. It might not be crazy money compared to some other corporations like Google inc, Microsoft or Pfizer, but 3% is not a bad profit margin.
To use an analogy I found in some forums, supposing once every day you buy something for 1.99 and sell it for 2.00 ... your profit margin on sales is .5%, but by the end of the year you've still increased your initial investment by more than 50% .If we do the same thing with a 3% profit margin on sales, then you increase you initial investment more than tenfold. Add to this the fact that almost every expense that these companies incur, such as sales, marketing, billing, claims, lawyers, (plus, increased bureaucracies in other places such as hospitals, just to deal with insurance company red tape.) are completely irrelevant to the goal of providing health care and you find that this is not a very compelling argument at all.
I still need to work on the politics thing. But it's hard not to want to talk about it. This is not just abstract stuff to bat back and forth over a cup of coffee, it's the stuff that makes the world go round, it affects the real lives of real people, and damn it, I shouldn't care about it less, other people should care about it more.
RPing again will be nice. Looking forward to it. Going to work on my character sheet tonight.
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