whatever he was comparing, he sounds like a buffoon

Philly the Kid wrote:If you don't include Democracy Now as part of your daily news, then you are just myopic with blinders. Be curious as to what some of ye strong opined BSGers have to say about the reveal on the pacific trade pact in secret that got exposed. Check out the interview and discussion on it on today's Dem Now to fully learn that Obama is just like Bush, Clinton etc... usurp congress and constitution with treaties in secret that are all for corps to circumvent ANY regulations and make tax payers pay THEM for problems later...

This is how it is... Democracy is a joke.

How is it undemocratic. The President and his administration gets to negotiate treaties. Public negotiations tend not to work super well. You do realize that the negotiated treaty is not worth a sheet of paper until the Senate confirms it? Then they get to examine it, dissect it, hold hearings on it, question those in the administration who negotiated and support it. In short, next to everybody gets to kibbitz, lobby, pay Congress to vote one way or another, before the treaty takes force.

drsmooth wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:He was comparing the efficiency of getting a hoagie at Wawa(s) to the inefficiency of the federal government, with his example being a local optometrist who had trouble dealing with a federal agency getting reimbursement payments when he tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to change his location within a town.

you should know, and romney ought to have known, that in health care at least the federal government contracts many of these transactional functions out to - horrors! - private-sector health insurers. so it's not likely the inefficiency of the federal government that troubled his aggrieved optometrist.

So if a practice is moving their office they don't have any federal paperwork to fill out to make sure their Medicare/Medicaid payments find their way to the right place? Everything is conducted through private companies?

I guess even with the paperwork routed through private companies, if the federal rules/requirements are confusing enough then his point might still have a bit of merit, but it loses most of its starch.

Palmetto GBA (a LLC subsidiary of S Carolina Blue Cross & Blue Shield) handles most of the Medicare/Medicaid processing stuff (something like 40+ states, DC, PR, etc.). The rest (or most of the rest) is handled by another LLC (Cahaba).

jerseyhoya wrote:So if a practice is moving their office they don't have any federal paperwork to fill out to make sure their Medicare/Medicaid payments find their way to the right place? Everything is conducted through private companies?

I guess even with the paperwork routed through private companies, if the federal rules/requirements are confusing enough then his point might still have a bit of merit, but it loses most of its starch.

uhhhmmm, what?

I must confess I'm no expert on this particular cranny of the functioning of the federal government, but I can assure you that it is a minute, inconsequential, insignificant, and vanishing matter, much, much less vital to, or even representative of, the sustenance of the federal body politic than the amazing operation of wawas touchtone order processing magichinery.

Mitt's anecdote yesterday on the inefficient nature of the federal government described an optometrist who moved his practice across town and had to fill out a complicated 33 page form in order to receive payments at his new address. It took him three tries to properly fill it out after calls to the agency responsible proved fruitless in answering his questions about specific parts in their own form. The moral of the story was the federal government does not provide the same level of service to John Q. Citizen as Wawa touch screens because it doesn't face the competitive pressures of the market.

You jumped in, with your typical condescending flair, and said that I should know and Mitt ought to have known the federal gov't contracts many of these things to private companies. Which is a fine point if this optometrist was really dealing with a private company rather than a federal agency. And a useless one if this particular cranny of the functioning of the federal government actually required interacting with the federal government in the manner the story was told.

Is the anecdote, even if accurately relayed, a completely representative sample of what it is to interact with the federal government? Of course not, but I think you'll find more often than not anecdotes in political campaigns tend to highlight the negative aspects of things a candidate is trying to attack.

I have no knowledge of that particular anecdote, but a significant percentage of the time when you're dealing with Medicare, you're actually dealing with a government contractor. So it is a valid point to suggest that perhaps the anecdote is misleading.

And no matter what, Mitt still sounded like a douche in the way he told it.

jerseyhoya wrote:Mitt's anecdote yesterday on the inefficient nature of the federal government described an optometrist who moved his practice across town and had to fill out a complicated 33 page form in order to receive payments at his new address. It took him three tries to properly fill it out after calls to the agency responsible proved fruitless in answering his questions about specific parts in their own form. The moral of the story was the federal government does not provide the same level of service to John Q. Citizen as Wawa touch screens because it doesn't face the competitive pressures of the market.

You jumped in, with your typical condescending flair, and said that I should know and Mitt ought to have known the federal gov't contracts many of these things to private companies. Which is a fine point if this optometrist was really dealing with a private company rather than a federal agency. And a useless one if this particular cranny of the functioning of the federal government actually required interacting with the federal government in the manner the story was told.

Is the anecdote, even if accurately relayed, a completely representative sample of what it is to interact with the federal government? Of course not, but I think you'll find more often than not anecdotes in political campaigns tend to highlight the negative aspects of things a candidate is trying to attack.

Well, to be clear, I was not condescending, I was calling bullshit.

And yes, I DO want a long-form copy of the long, long form Romney insists the guy had to complete. Because that's total bullshit.

MoBettle wrote:in his defense the wawa ordering screen is awesome.

calling it "wawa's" is much funnier imo.

those were my exact takeaways also

Apparently the funniest part of the video was Romney trying to compare running a government serving 313 million people to ordering a 6" sub at Wawa.

By my rough calculations, it seems that if the election were held today, Romney would win the popular vote, by a decent margin, but Obama still would win the Electoral College. If that is the ultimate outcome, I think certain segments of the nation are going to go bat shit crazy. Hopefully, they'll do it on-line and through talk radio. I hope they don't disrupt any NFL games.

Germany set to allow eurozone bailout fund to buy troubled countries' debt. Between this and the more centrist coalition winning the Greek election, they might turn this thing around yet.

TenuredVulture wrote:By my rough calculations, it seems that if the election were held today, Romney would win the popular vote, by a decent margin, but Obama still would win the Electoral College. If that is the ultimate outcome, I think certain segments of the nation are going to go bat #$!&@ crazy. Hopefully, they'll do it on-line and through talk radio. I hope they don't disrupt any NFL games.

I've got 280-258 right now in favor of Obama, and I think I'm being generous to Romney with my map. We'll see how this changes as time moves on.

jerseyhoya wrote:Mitt's anecdote yesterday on the inefficient nature of the federal government described an optometrist who moved his practice across town and had to fill out a complicated 33 page form in order to receive payments at his new address. It took him three tries to properly fill it out after calls to the agency responsible proved fruitless in answering his questions about specific parts in their own form. The moral of the story was the federal government does not provide the same level of service to John Q. Citizen as Wawa touch screens because it doesn't face the competitive pressures of the market.

There is a reason provider change of address isn't as easy as ordering a sammich. For fraud prevention, they need to verify that both the provider and new address are legit. And the provider change of address form is /not/ 33 pages, it's like 3 or 4 pages and reletively straight forward. If this provider's submission was 33 pages, then he/she probably had to itemize a lot of fraud allegations and other legal stuff that may idicate a potential for present or future fraudulent actions (convictions, malpractice, civil judgements against, etc.). I'm not implying anything about the provider in this parable, just that the 33 pages was either an exaggeration or lie, or details are missing from the story.

Of course there isn't much competitive market pressure, as it's a virtual monopoly for one privately owned corporation that has immunity from criminal investigation, prosecution, and audits (granted by Congress a few years ago).

Although this "Mitt Moment" wasn't really about the message, but the perception from how he delivered the message... that he comes across as being so insulated from "regular people" experiences due to his wealth.

In addition to people flipping out, if this comes to pass, the real problem will be the total lack of anything even resembling a mandate. In 2001, Bush never got a honeymoon period, and his Presidency very well could have foundered early on had it not been for 9/11. The ironic thing is the conservative attachment to the Electoral College seems to be based on little more than nostalgia for November 2000. And I guess love of Delaware's electoral heft.

Phan In Phlorida wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Mitt's anecdote yesterday on the inefficient nature of the federal government described an optometrist who moved his practice across town and had to fill out a complicated 33 page form in order to receive payments at his new address. It took him three tries to properly fill it out after calls to the agency responsible proved fruitless in answering his questions about specific parts in their own form. The moral of the story was the federal government does not provide the same level of service to John Q. Citizen as Wawa touch screens because it doesn't face the competitive pressures of the market.

There is a reason provider change of address isn't as easy as ordering a sammich. For fraud prevention, they need to verify that both the provider and new address are legit. And the provider change of address form is /not/ 33 pages, it's like 3 or 4 pages and reletively straight forward. If this provider's submission was 33 pages, then he/she probably had to itemize a lot of fraud allegations and other legal stuff that may idicate a potential for present or future fraudulent actions (convictions, malpractice, civil judgements against, etc.). I'm not implying anything about the provider in this parable, just that the 33 pages was either an exaggeration or lie, or details are missing from the story.

Of course there isn't much competitive market pressure, as it's a virtual monopoly for one privately owned corporation that has immunity from criminal investigation, prosecution, and audits (granted by Congress a few years ago).

Although this "Mitt Moment" wasn't really about the message, but the perception from how he delivered the message... that he comes across as being so insulated from "regular people" experiences due to his wealth.

However, unless you go to Wawas, you probably don't order your sandwich with a touchscreen device. Moreover, you're probably going to Subway or Quiznos, where the person who is making your sandwich probably has never even heard of provolone cheese.

traderdave wrote:Apparently the funniest part of the video was Romney trying to compare running a government serving 313 million people to ordering a 6" sub at Wawa.

To be fair, Wawa sells 80 million hoagies a year.

I hate the damn touchscreen

hmm...now guessing that the wawa ceo/president/owner is a big elephant contributor.

Why couldn't the form just be completed and verified on-line? That would seem to be the biggest inefficiency if the provider was unable to do it that way. There's no reason that couldn't be done.