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Americans overwhelmingly say marijuana should be legal

pewresearch.org

131–135 of 135 posts

Re: Americans overwhelmingly say marijuana should be legal

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you just brought it up as an example, but I'm much more interested in a Direct Primary Care healthcare strategy over Medicare for All. https://www.dpcare.org/

Looked through the site. Could not figure out what DPC is, besides that it's a new innovative way of patients and doctors working together for their mutual benefit with no obvious drawbacks.

This video explains it fairly well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2QaObLRLi0 though it doesn't cover everything. The doctor in that video also has their own website: https://www.epiphanyhealth.org/

The Primary Care (the PC in DPC) part refers to normal day-to-day health needs typically offered by general practitioners. Things like regular checkups, cuts and scrapes, lab work, typical vaccinations, etc etc. You already think about PC healthcare as a 'service', but you pay your insurance company (with your employer watching in for some reason) to pay the doctor for you. That adds a lot of overhead, more than one might think.

So DPC is where you pay for primary care by subscribing Directly (that's the D) to the doctor by paying a regular, fixed-price subscription to them. Typically $50-$100/mo, the doctor mentioned above charges $75/mo. Receive care as frequently as needed, with no copays, by any means, with reasonable prices for more specialized services like x-rays ($25), and an affordable in-house pharmacy for generic medications. Their office negotiates direct rates for lab work and can get a 95% discount (!) in some cases according to the doctor in the video.

Now there are some caveats, as per usual.

The biggest is that this strategy is specifically for Primary Care, not hospitalizations and other specialized or emergency health services. For those perhaps health insurance can still provide value. But that's the original purpose of insurance in the first place: covering unexpected large expenses. And that's the key: Primary Care is neither an unexpected nor large expense -- it's regular maintenance, more like an oil change; are you paying your insurance company to pay your mechanic to perform oil changes on your car? Unlikely, and it sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare on the face. Yet somehow this is business as usual for healthcare in the US.

Re: Americans overwhelmingly say marijuana should be legal

#132
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't care about the increase. I care about disproving / proving DUI in court. Without a valid blood test / breath test and some standards, its going to be a rough go. As to if high people are bad drivers, then yes they are. I don't even know how that's a debate. What constitutes high is the real debate.

My point is that all of this is already a problem. Legalization will, if nothing else, make it easier to conduct research and get funding to fix some of this.

Well, when pot was illegal they just arrested them on possession and didn't have to worry about the rest. Now, we need some standards or else some people are getting DUIs.

Re: Americans overwhelmingly say marijuana should be legal

#133
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want weed to be illegal because you don't like the smell of the smoke?

It sounds more likely they would like it to be illegal for one to force others to be subject to second hand smoke.

Ah I see.

I feel that it's unreasonable to equate second hand marijuana smoke with second hand tobacco. It's really hard to consume weed to the same extent as tobacco, so the smoke is in much lower quantity.

Re: Americans overwhelmingly say marijuana should be legal

#134
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sorry, what's wrong with California regulating emissions? Nothing. Ideally it would be at the federal level so California wouldn't have to do it though. > If 90% of people in Alabama don't want weed legalized, don't force it upon them. No. The hypothetical ninety percent of people in Alabama have no right to restrict the rights of the other ten percent. It doesn't affect them. They should stay out of it.

> The hypothetical ninety percent of people in Alabama have no right to restrict the rights of the other ten percent My castle - my rules. I have close to 100% right to restrict smoking in my home. I have close to 0% right to restrict smoking on the whole planet. The boundary is somewhere in between.

Absolutely. States rights is no panacea either. You’ll still have power struggle within the state and personally it makes no sense to devolve power to the state, or heavens forbid, county/parish or town level.

The federal government should say things like this is the baseline - you can go one way on it but not the other. Personally, I want more of this, not less. For instance, I want a federal land/property tax that local governments can’t just make go away in a race to the bottom.

I want a federal ban on capital punishment. Meaning no jurisdiction within these United States should have the legal authority to give capital punishment.

Devolving power lower doesn’t solve any problem. It is seriously scary if you’re a minority. And you don’t have to be black or gay to be a minority, you could just be the wrong denomination of Christianity.

From what I’ve read, we used to demonize everyone from the Irish, the Germans, the Italians. Nobody is safe from the tyranny of the majority and the more you devolve power to a local level, the more these problems will grow larger.

Personally the whole point of government is to protect the individual from the whims of the masses. If I want to smoke weed (I don’t but just an example), the rest of the town shouldn’t be able to tell what I can do. What if fifty one percent of a town decides it wants to be “whites only”?

Re: Americans overwhelmingly say marijuana should be legal

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't answer my question. Why is it important to represent a "state"? Hypothetically if you had only two states, one with 20 people and the other with 20 million (entirely feasible with the Constitution), would it be useful to given them both 2 Senators each? Would the federal government's laws and actions faithfully represent how the people in the nation actually feel? This isn't a hypothetical concern. See the la…

Because that was the condition on which the states joined the union and it's what many states, and the people in them, still want. They want local control, not to be forced to follow what the majority in bigger states decide. That's because local control gives each person more power over their own life.

> Because that was the condition on which the states joined the union

That's true for maybe the first 13 colonies. The subsequent states were largely formed by settlers from the first 13 and they just wanted their land to be a state in their country. For them, the constitution was kind of a take-it-or-leave-it deal.

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