[fabsroman]

Skeet,

I still live in a townhouse and I do not have any powder here. I don't do any reloading here. I do it all at my parents' place and if I buy 5 pounds of powder I try to run through it all in one sitting. Yes, I guess I am in violation of the law briefly because I would have 5 pounds of smokeless and some of the pyrodex pellets laying around, but it wouldn't be for very long. Being an officer of the Court doesn't mean that I get hanged for violating a law, it just means I need to try and observe them as well as possible. Everybody makes mistakes once in a while.

Regarding the guns and felons. I am not saying that there should be any restriction on somebody's right to own a gun, except for felons. Requiring that ALL firearms sales, even private individual to private individual, goes through a FFL and the buyer goes through a NICS check is not really infringing on somebody's right to own a gun. Yeah, it costs $20 for the NICS check, which I really do not think is unreasonable. Look, it is costing us money right now to exercise our right to free speech over the internet via our service provider fee.

The big difference between a NICS check and related fee upon purchase and the annual registration fee is the purpose behind the laws. The first is to prevent felons from getting guns, the second is to make it harder and costlier to own guns. Yes, there is a fee related to a NICS check, but such is life. We could make the NICS check fee free, but you know somebody has to pay for it. So, either the gun purchaser pays for it or society (i.e., all taxpayers) pay for it.

Regarding health care, something needs to be done about it period. Wait until Medicare needs to be canceled or the age extended because the country cannot afford it. Same thing will happen with social security. Funny thing is that here is the opposite argument Skeet. You throw it in my face that I can afford the extra cost for the NICS checks for gun purchases, Well, guess what, I can probably afford the extra cost for health care for quite some time, but at the rate we are going, I might not be able to afford it forever. The way insurance works is to spread the risk across a broad population. The problem with health insurance is that the companies try to eliminate individual high risk people with a pre-existing condition. However, if is is a group policy of 2 or more people, they don't really care about pre-existing conditions. Now, why can't the insurance company spread the risk of a pre-existing condition across ALL of their insureds, instead of just across the people on that specific plan. They do it with group plans, otherwise a 2 person or 3 person group plan with a single person with a pre-existing condition would still be ridiculously expensive. So, why not pass a law making it illegal for insurance companies to charge individual rates that take into account the specific person's pre-existing condition instead of figuring the likelihood of applicants with pre-existing conditions and spreading that risk amongst their entire pool of insureds. Of course, the individual still needs to pay the premium himself/herself. Now, there could be exceptions for self-inflicted conditions like obesity, alcoholism, smoking, etc. However, why should somebody be told that they cannot get health insurance for their 4 month old baby because the baby is in the 99th percentile for weight and is considered to be obese? That is utterly nuts.

My take on people not working is that they should receive government provided health care as long as they qualify for unemployment insurance benefits. If they do not qualify for unemployment benefits they are SOL.

The big issue with health care costs is just that, health care costs are increasing faster than inflation. So, either we need people to die sooner, or health care will eventually be way too expensive and so will health insurance. There has to be a way to control it.

Did I give my example of my wife's OBGYN charging $4,800 for our son's delivery in May when the OBGYN was late to the delivery and the house OBGYN did the delivery and was in the room for all of 10 minutes. Granted, my wife's OBGYN did check up on her a couple of times while she was in the hospital. I would say they spent 2 hours tops with my wife, including the time the house OBGYN spent delivering the baby, and they charged $4,800. That is utterly nuts.

How about the fact that doctors charge insane rates because they know that insurance companies are going to discount them? What happens to the poor guy that needs medical service but doesn't have insurance. Do the doctors reduce the charge in that case. Nope. Next thing you know the poor guy is coming to me because he is getting sued and I am trying to work out some type of agreement with the providers to accept a reduced amount. He is paying me $135 an hour for something that the providers would have willingly reduced for the insurance companies.

Simply put, free markets will not work in today's society. Today's society is way too complicated. Look at the derivative trading that was a part of this entire recession. Hardly anybody understood any of that.

By the way, just in case you didn't notice, you were wrong about there being no law in Maryland that requires retailers of gun powder to obtain the ID of the person buying the gunpowder. FYI - this requirement applies to ALL gunpowder, not just 5 pound kegs. Also, if you knew about the 5 pound limit so long ago and know so many people, LEO's and Fire Marshalls included, that are against it, why not try to get it repealed? I thought about writing my state representative about it, but my state representative is in Montgomery County and as liberal as can be. Planning on moving to Howard County soon, so maybe I'll take up the issue at that time.

At the end of the day, I hope the California law gets repealed at some point, I hope something happens to stem the soaring costs of health care, and I hope something happens to help reduce the national debt. In the meantime, I'll make sure I have plenty of ammo handy.

By the way, the issue with health care costs is that as they increase, less and less people will be able to afford them. So, the risk/cost will not be able to be spread amongst a large pool. The people that will most likely go without insurance are the young/healthy. Guess what, they wouldn't cost the pool very much and most of their premiums would be used to pay for the elderly/sickly. As more and more health people withdraw from the pool because they cannot afford to pay the premium, that means the elderly/sickly will have to pay more or they will also have to drop out. Guess what happens to them then. This is something that HMO's experienced initially. At first, they were making money hand over fist because the people signing up for them were the healthy people that only worried about what the premium cost was because they never had to go to the doctor. I was one of those people at age 21. I went with Kaiser. Well, as those people got older and stuck with the HMO, guess what the HMO's figured out, they were no longer making as much profit, if any, because their treatment costs went up. Then, the premium went up.

If 50% of Americans cannot afford health insurance/health care and the national debt is going to be $20 trillion in 10 years and arguably $50 trillion in 10 years, you have to admit that these are problems that need to be addressed. Of course, we can all take head in the sand approach and just keep stocking up on ammo. Guess where this nation will be after that? We need compromise in a lot of areas.