USA What issue would you like to see Congress address?

NewCreation435

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What issue do you think the US Congress needs to spend more times addressing? Immigration, gun control, the debt or something else maybe?
i've noticed a lot of news about climate control issues lately, but it doesn't seem the current administration has addressed that issue at all.
 

hedrick

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The most critical long term is global warmin.

The most critical now is health. Neither is possible with a Republican Senate.
 

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The most critical long term is global warmin.

The most critical now is health. Neither is possible with a Republican Senate.
I wonder why it's up to our government to fix global warming? As an example maybe?
Anyway I believe everyone should be given free cancer scannings every year, the best way to fight cancer is to catch it early
 

hedrick

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I wonder why it's up to our government to fix global warming? As an example maybe?
Anyway I believe everyone should be given free cancer scannings every year, the best way to fight cancer is to catch it early

The argument is basically that competition can't result in a solution if it's less expensive to ignore global warming. Competition will cause companies that voluntarily do the right thing to lose, because it's more expensive. Indeed you can argue that their responsibility to act in the interest of their stockholders actually prohibits companies from making products emit less carbon where that makes the products less competitive.

There are longer-term reasons why in some industries companies do want to address the issue. But I don't think this is universal. The auto industry is an example. They want tight pollution laws, because it will force American companies to develop technology that will make them more competitive world-wide. But without regulation, the companies with a longer-term view will be attacked by companies with short-run thoughts, and will find it hard to sustain their long-term model in the short term. The Trump administration's attack on California is actually an attack on the long-term viability of the US auto industry.

This is the argument for a lot of regulation. Why not depend upon competition to prevent child labor, dangerous working conditions, etc? Because without some types of regulation there's a competitive race to the bottom.
 

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What issue do you think the US Congress needs to spend more times addressing? Immigration, gun control, the debt or something else maybe?
i've noticed a lot of news about climate control issues lately, but it doesn't seem the current administration has addressed that issue at all.

What do you want the administration to do, when you say it hasn't addressed it? Do you want to see lots of wailing and howling, and inviting children to fly in from abroad to howl and wail at us some more? Do you want more dumping of the consequences of mining rare minerals onto developing nations because it apparently doesn't matter if children are digging stuff out of the ground as long as we get to feel good about ourselves for our climate wokeness, even as we reject nuclear power that ticks so many boxes because, you know, we can't do that here?

I'd like to see meaningful progress on healthcare reform. The system of private insurers picking and choosing what they cover but not telling the customers until after the bill arrives is ridiculous. The ACA, although a lifeline for many, is a sick joke for many others. In many ways shopping for health insurance is like trying to choose motor insurance when one insurance company will cover collisions but won't pay if you hit a Ford or a Chevy, another will cover collisions but not if the accident is on a Thursday, while a third costs 50% more and doesn't seem to have specific exclusions until you find that when you skidded on ice and hit a tree they won't pay because it was a sugar maple you hit and that's excluded in clause 105, section (k), subsection (viii). The UK system people hail is a joke as well, although from what I can tell the Swiss system works well combining public service with private insurance. I'd need to read more about it to understand its strengths and weaknesses better, but from what I've seen so far it seems to provide better service than the US or UK models.

The debt and deficits also have to be addressed. Sooner or later the silly games with trillions of dollars will stop, and when that happens the results will be seriously ugly. I wouldn't be surprised if that's at least part of the reason behind the increasing push by some to confiscate privately held firearms.
 

NewCreation435

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What do you want the administration to do, when you say it hasn't addressed it? Do you want to see lots of wailing and howling, and inviting children to fly in from abroad to howl and wail at us some more? Do you want more dumping of the consequences of mining rare minerals onto developing nations because it apparently doesn't matter if children are digging stuff out of the ground as long as we get to feel good about ourselves for our climate wokeness, even as we reject nuclear power that ticks so many boxes because, you know, we can't do that here?

I'd like to see meaningful progress on healthcare reform. The system of private insurers picking and choosing what they cover but not telling the customers until after the bill arrives is ridiculous. The ACA, although a lifeline for many, is a sick joke for many others. In many ways shopping for health insurance is like trying to choose motor insurance when one insurance company will cover collisions but won't pay if you hit a Ford or a Chevy, another will cover collisions but not if the accident is on a Thursday, while a third costs 50% more and doesn't seem to have specific exclusions until you find that when you skidded on ice and hit a tree they won't pay because it was a sugar maple you hit and that's excluded in clause 105, section (k), subsection (viii). The UK system people hail is a joke as well, although from what I can tell the Swiss system works well combining public service with private insurance. I'd need to read more about it to understand its strengths and weaknesses better, but from what I've seen so far it seems to provide better service than the US or UK models.

The debt and deficits also have to be addressed. Sooner or later the silly games with trillions of dollars will stop, and when that happens the results will be seriously ugly. I wouldn't be surprised if that's at least part of the reason behind the increasing push by some to confiscate privately held firearms.

Personally I'd like to see something done about healthcare also including making life saving drugs like insulin more affordable. I have great insurance, so I don't have to worry about it right now, but some people don't have that luxury
 

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Personally I'd like to see something done about healthcare also including making life saving drugs like insulin more affordable. I have great insurance, so I don't have to worry about it right now, but some people don't have that luxury

Making treatment more affordable in general shouldn't be overly difficult. Where extremely specialised procedures are concerned it's understandable that prices are high because there are so few facilities and staff available who can perform it. Where something as simple as going for an annual checkup at the doctor's is concerned it's ridiculous that the base price of the process can run to hundreds of dollars for what's little more than a 15-minute chat. If anything insurance most likely drives the price up, partly by adding a layer of bureaucracy in the middle of everything that has to be paid for and partly by hiding the cost from the end user so they become less sensitive to the cost.

There also needs to be much better handling of the process that bills the individual - it's ridiculous to be in a place where you get multiple bills for the same hospital visit and there's never a point where you can be confident the bills have stopped. Maybe there are separate bills for the facility and the staff, but is it really so much to ask the hospital to combine them into a single bill so the individual gets a single bill and knows it's done? It would also be good to have a time limit, beyond which the hospital can no longer issue bills. Frankly if the hospital can't process a simple bill within maybe 3-4 weeks they should be absorbing the cost themselves, rather than leaving the individual using the service hanging around knowing a bill might be coming but with no idea of whether they will get a bill, when it will come, or how much it will be.

For good measure there needs to be much more transparent pricing. For things that are medically critical (in the sense that if you don't have the treatment you'll die) the chances are most people won't be overly sensitive to the price. But for more elective treatments it's simply not good enough that people can't even get an idea of how much something will cost. It's not unreasonable for the individual to figure that if it will cost $500 they'll have it done but at $2000 they'll just live with a condition that might be annoying but isn't getting any worse. Nobody would take their car in for repair if the best the garage could say was "we'll work out the bill once it's all done" without even an idea of whether it's a $500 job or a $5000 job.

It would make a lot of sense to change the way insurance works. Firstly much of what health "insurance" covers isn't actually insurance by any reasonable definition of "insurance". That aside, where is the sense in everything being split into calendar years, such that if you start a treatment in December and finish it in January you end up paying two lots of deductible, whereas if you start the same treatment in June and finish it in July you pay once?
 

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Maybe this doesn't sound very important but what I'd like politicians to address is plastic recycling because we need to have something set up here in our own country for that. I haven't read up on the latest but for a while China was rejecting our shipments of plastic to be recycled so it was just going into our landfills anyway even though we were all putting the plastics in our recycling bins.
 

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Maybe this doesn't sound very important but what I'd like politicians to address is plastic recycling because we need to have something set up here in our own country for that. I haven't read up on the latest but for a while China was rejecting our shipments of plastic to be recycled so it was just going into our landfills anyway even though we were all putting the plastics in our recycling bins.

Or...perhaps if the US did not permit Ontario to dump its waste in the United States rather than in its own country, 4/5 of which is virtually uninhabited....
 

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Maybe this doesn't sound very important but what I'd like politicians to address is plastic recycling because we need to have something set up here in our own country for that. I haven't read up on the latest but for a while China was rejecting our shipments of plastic to be recycled so it was just going into our landfills anyway even though we were all putting the plastics in our recycling bins.

There is a certain irony in shipping garbage half way around the world in order to save pollution.

On the topic of recycling I'd like to see more joined up thinking where recycling is concerned. It's absurd to claim to be doing something to benefit the environment while using drinking quality water (i.e. water that has taken up energy to purify it) to clean the last scraps of mayonnaise out of a jar or rinse the oil out of a can of something, then burning up fuel to drive them to a recycling plant, and so on. Since recyclables don't need drinking quality water to clean them, why not put recycling plants near rivers? They can draw in as much water as they need, wash out the remaining foodstuffs from containers, filter the crud out of the water and pass the filtered water back into the river.

Where drinks are sold in glass bottles it would make sense to have trucks collecting empties as they deliver full cases. The store that sells a case of bottles now has a space where the case used to be, which could be used to store returned empties. Then when the truck drops off a case of full bottles it has space where the case once sat, so it could take the case of empties away. So the truck would set off from the distributor loaded with cases of full bottles, and return loaded with cases of empty bottles. The empty bottles could then be autoclaved to sterilise them and reused. If they were damaged to the point reuse wasn't an option they could be sent for recycling.
 

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Or...perhaps if the US did not permit Ontario to dump its waste in the United States rather than in its own country, 4/5 of which is virtually uninhabited....

Wait. What? They do that?
 

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What issue do you think the US Congress needs to spend more times addressing? Immigration, gun control, the debt or something else maybe?
i've noticed a lot of news about climate control issues lately, but it doesn't seem the current administration has addressed that issue at all.
Mistreatment of the "religious" in China

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Josiah

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What issue do you think the US Congress needs to spend more times addressing? Immigration, gun control, the debt or something else maybe?
i've noticed a lot of news about climate control issues lately, but it doesn't seem the current administration has addressed that issue at all.[/OUOTE]


1. Abortion. It needs to be outlawed (except to save the physical life of the mother - about one-tenth of one percent of all abortions now). AND with it, increased support for adoption and foster families, increased support for poor families

2. Infascratructure.... Our roads, bridges, power grid, etc. are terrible - worse than some third-world countries. Oh, and that power grid needs upgrading against solar flares and terrorists (easy to do, we are very vulnerable).

3. Health care. It's been a growing mess for decades. Obama made it worse. Trump promised to eliminate the failed actions of the past and totally start over. He had two years of both houses controlled by Republicans (many elected to do this very thing) and nothing happened. We have the best health care in the world - but it's FAR too expensive, the insurance system is a joke, and some lack the preventative care that is cheaper and better.


Instead, the House is fixated on SOME trumpt up means to eliminate Trump since the Democrats obviously feel they can't defeat him via democracy.



.
 

NewCreation435

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NewCreation435

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What issue do you think the US Congress needs to spend more times addressing? Immigration, gun control, the debt or something else maybe?
i've noticed a lot of news about climate control issues lately, but it doesn't seem the current administration has addressed that issue at all.[/OUOTE]


1. Abortion. It needs to be outlawed (except to save the physical life of the mother - about one-tenth of one percent of all abortions now). AND with it, increased support for adoption and foster families, increased support for poor families

2. Infascratructure.... Our roads, bridges, power grid, etc. are terrible - worse than some third-world countries. Oh, and that power grid needs upgrading against solar flares and terrorists (easy to do, we are very vulnerable).

3. Health care. It's been a growing mess for decades. Obama made it worse. Trump promised to eliminate the failed actions of the past and totally start over. He had two years of both houses controlled by Republicans (many elected to do this very thing) and nothing happened. We have the best health care in the world - but it's FAR too expensive, the insurance system is a joke, and some lack the preventative care that is cheaper and better.


Instead, the House is fixated on SOME trumpt up means to eliminate Trump since the Democrats obviously feel they can't defeat him via democracy.



.

it would really help if people would stop using the emergency room for their primary care. Then they don't pay for the service and that drives up costs for the rest of us who do pay
 

Josiah

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Josiah said:


1. Abortion. It needs to be outlawed (except to save the physical life of the mother - about one-tenth of one percent of all abortions now). AND with it, increased support for adoption and foster families, increased support for poor families

2. Infascratructure
.... Our roads, bridges, power grid, etc. are terrible - worse than some third-world countries. Oh, and that power grid needs upgrading against solar flares and terrorists (easy to do, we are very vulnerable).

3. Health care. It's been a growing mess for decades. Obama made it worse. Trump promised to eliminate the failed actions of the past and totally start over. He had two years of both houses controlled by Republicans (many elected to do this very thing) and nothing happened. We have the best health care in the world - but it's FAR too expensive, the insurance system is a joke, and some lack the preventative care that is cheaper and better.


Instead, the House is fixated on SOME trumpt up means to eliminate Trump since the Democrats obviously feel they can't defeat him via democracy.



.

it would really help if people would stop using the emergency room for their primary care. Then they don't pay for the service and that drives up costs for the rest of us who do pay


SO many issues driving up costs..... You hit on just one. Where I live, the ER's are VERY crowded - probably 90% are illegal aliens with the flu or whatever, because the care is FREE and it's illegal to ask about their citizenship status.
 

Albion

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What issue do you think the US Congress needs to spend more times addressing? Immigration, gun control, the debt or something else maybe?
i've noticed a lot of news about climate control issues lately, but it doesn't seem the current administration has addressed that issue at all.

Climate control is exactly that--control. Of everybody. That is the actual objective there and it has little to do with climate which we in the West cannot control anyway. So this particular problem area (the climate) isn't the answer to the question asked on this thread.

But if I had to choose something else, I think it probably would be immigration. The future of many countries is at stake, and there are many different proposals that reasonable people have made. Intellectually, we are working on solutions, but we cannot move forward because of other factors.

If we in the USA could just be permitted to get away from the attempt to repeal the election of 2016 and instead address this really important issue of uncontrolled immigration IN SOME WAY, there would be strong support among people of almost all political leanings.
 

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tango

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Mistreatment of the "religious" in China

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What do you think Congress should do about the actions of another sovereign nation?
 

popsthebuilder

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What do you think Congress should do about the actions of another sovereign nation?
I have no clue. I generally stay out of politics, but they are doing some pretty bad things to religious folk around those parts.

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