That is a man created myth, didn't you know?

Super-Rich Americans Now Have Emergency Rooms In Own Homes

The Huffington Post | By Bonnie Kavoussi Posted: 03/16/2012 12:47 pm Updated: 03/16/2012 2:29 pm

Money may not be able to buy happiness, but it can pay for you to avoid the headache of a waiting room. And that's a start.

Some wealthy households are choosing to forgo health insurance in favor of paying a monthly fee -- totaling up to $30,000 per year -- for concierge medicine, or the ability to have access to their physicians anywhere, anytime, Bloomberg News reports. Some families even have emergency rooms in their own homes, which can cost $1 million.

Though the number of concierge patients remains small, 64 percent of all doctors believe that concierge medicine has the best chance of financial success today, according to a survey by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. Concierge medicine first appeared in the mid-1990s, as some doctors wanted to spend more time with their patients and rich patients wanted to pay for better healthcare.

In addition to concierge medicine, the wealthy have a variety of plush options to choose from when it comes to their health care. Some hospitals are competing for wealthy clients by offering perks like butlers, fancy beds, beautiful views, and fine food. Some of New York-Presbyterian's luxury hospital rooms can cost patients $1,000 to $1,500 per day.

Wealthy families' access to all of these options likely only exacerbates the health care gap between the rich and the poor. A study in the U.K. found that managers live three years longer on average than workers with routine tasks. In addition, Harvard graduates live ten years longer on average then men living in inner-city Boston, according to a study from researchers at the university . Three in ten Harvard graduates lived to age 90, while the average American lives for 78 years, the study found.

Meanwhile, health care costs continue to rise as Americans' incomes when adjusted for inflation fall. Americans' health care spending in 2008 was triple what it was in 1990, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The average family spent $13,770 on health care in 2010, according to a separate Kaiser report: 28 percent of the annual median household income.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/16/concierge-medicine_n_1353155.html?ref=business&ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009

I meant shouldn't or eventually will be

They are working it out of the government slowly but surely. When I worked for the government we were not allowed to bring our religions to work at all. Nothing on our desks or bodies. And I will continue to work to get it so that no religion is represented in the government at all.

I would agree personally. As long as it is not publicly displayed then wear what you want. But ultimately the employer should be able to control what their employees represent to the public.

Genetics play a role in everything that has to do with humans. That said, environment, role models, life experience, etc.... play a major role in how we view ourselves and interact with others.

So I would have to say both and more. Social attitudes effect us more than we realize.

If fat was deemed beautiful by society, there would be no one trying/dressing to be, worried about being, or believing skinny was a desired state of being. Nor would men be encouraged to seek skinny women by their shallow friends and family.

Home Depot Founder Virulently Anti-Obama – Could Race Be To Blame?
March 15, 2012
By Wendy Gittleson

If billionaire Home Depot mogul, Ken Langone has his way, there will be a new face in the White House come January. That face, he hopes, will belong to fellow mogul, Mitt Romney.

Long before Romney declared his intention to run for the Presidency, Langone regularly expressed his discontent with the Obama administration. His complaints ranged from unsubstantiated policy disagreements to what many would call racist code.

Langone is not your typical partisan hack. He believes that the wealthy should pay more in taxes.

“People like me have to understand that it isn’t business as usual,” he said. “I think it’s a travesty for a man of my success and my means to get anything from the federal government. I think I should pay more taxes.”

He has supported Democrats like Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), NY Rep. Carolyn Maloney and NY Governor Andrew Cuomo.


So what is so different about President Obama? Naturally, many of Langone’s criticisms have to do with the economy. He has called Obama anti-business and has accused him of promoting class warfare.

The irony of those criticisms, at least from the perspective of Langone, is that Home Depot has now had nine straight quarters of double digit earnings-per-share growth. In other words, they are doing just fine under the Obama administration. Hourly wages for Home Depot employees range from $8.00 to $18.00 an hour. On the other end of the spectrum, the CEO of Home Depot, Frank Blake, received a compensation package of almost $10.5 million in 2010. The $8.00 hourly employee – assuming 40 hours a week – made just $16,640. Blake made 631 times the amount of his lowest paid employee. Those who defend the working class may be engaging in class warfare, but it’s companies like Langone’s who are foreign-made carpet bombing the villages.

Even his assertion that the Obama administration is killing jobs with regulations holds no water. Conservative David Brooks argued in the New York Times that Obama’s regulations have neither killed jobs nor businesses, and that they aren’t substantially more significant than his predecessor’s.

As a businessman, Langone has every right to disagree with the Obama administration on policy, however misguided and disjointed he may be.

Video here:

However, much of Langone’s criticism comes not from policy, but from perception.

“Ronald Reagan would never go into the Oval Office without his jacket on—that’s how much he revered the presidency,” he said. “This guy worked like hell to be president…Behave like a president. Let me look at you as a model to how we should behave. What does he say? Fat cats, jet airplanes. What is the purpose? Us versus them.

“He is not acting presidential. He is behaving in a way designed in my opinion to divide us, to make us look at each other with skepticism, with suspicion. That is the end of America as we know it,” he said. “The destruction he is inflicting by his behavior will carry on long after we settle the debt limit.”

He’s called the President “petulant,” a word typically reserved for children who act out. Are you seeing a pattern here? President Barack Obama has arguably been one of the most dignified statesman to occupy the Oval Office, yet Langone’s complaints have not been policy specific, but rather on how the President looks or with a three syllable synonym for the racist use of the word, “boy.” Even his suit jacket accusation was without merit.

Accusations of racism are nothing new to Langone’s company, Home Depot. In 2009, a Haitian immigrant sued Home Depot over allegations that the home improvement company gave preferential treatment to staffing agencies that were Caucasian owned. Ludin Pierre, the plaintiff in the suit, claimed,

He was dropped by Home Depot because “our only fault is we are a black, Haitian-owned company.” He notes that Home Depot gave contracts to several white-owned staffing agencies, but passed over the only black minority -owned company—despite the fact that Cosmo was supplying about 75% of the company’s temporary assignment needs at the time.

Pierre recalls at one Home Depot meeting, a Regional Human Resources employee at the company said, “We don’t like Haitians, and we don’t want them working here.” Pierre says Home Depot officials suggested that someone else should be representing his staffing agency. “One manager told me, ‘Change your front color.’” Pierre has a letter from a former Home Depot manager who apologizes for the anti-Haitian remarks that were reported to him, and adds: “I also feel bad that you lost many of your good workers due to the other agency’s recruiting them within Home Depot’s facilities. I don’t think that was right, and we should not have let that happen.”

The suit was dropped only after Home Depot ‘out lawyered’ Pierre. Pierre couldn’t afford to keep fighting the legal battles.

However, Pierre wasn’t alone in his complaints. The Huffington Post goes on to say,

Over the years, Home Depot has been hammered repeatedly with racial discrimination lawsuits. In Washington, D.C., in suburban Detroit, in Indianapolis, on Long Island — Home Depot workers sued their employer for racial discrimination. In 2004, two African-American workers in Los Angeles filed racial discrimination lawsuits claiming a Home Depot supervisor laughed as white employees dressed in Ku Klux Klan hoods harassed the black workers. In the same year, Home Depot agreed to pay $5.5 million to settle a racial discrimination lawsuit filed by employees in the company’s Colorado stores.

In New Jersey, where Ludin Pierre did business, the situation was not much better. In October of 2003, ten foreign-born Hispanic and black workers at Home Depot distribution centers in South Brunswick and Cranbury filed a lawsuit charging the company with discriminatory treatment. These workers — at the same distribution center with Ludin Pierre’s employees — sought class action status on behalf of 500 minority workers at Home Depot’s distribution centers throughout the state. They claimed they were paid less than white workers, not promoted or trained, and were subjected to harsher work conditions. In October of 2007, three nooses, carefully tied and hanging from a shelf in Aisle 14 of a Home Depot store in Passaic, New Jersey once again put the home improvement retailer in the headlines.

Throughout the years, they’ve also been known for gender discrimination and age discrimination.

As an American citizen, you say, Langone is entitled to his opinion, no matter how offensive. Of course you are correct. However, the difference between Langone’s First Amendment rights and the rights of the majority of Americans is that he is speaking from atop $1.5 billion.

Money, not the written or spoken word, will peddle the most influence in the 2012 elections. Langone is all-in for Romney. From Mother Jones:

Langone says that since he threw his lot in with Romney, he’s helped bring 90 percent of the megadonors on the Christie conference call into the Romney camp. “I would say virtually everybody who tried to persuade Christie is partial to Romney,” he told me when I reached him at his winter home in North Palm Beach, Florida. “Don’t forget: It’s the art of the possible, not the impossible,” he said. “Romney appears to be the likely candidate for the Republican Party.”

Even if we assume the best about Langone, that his intentions are not racist, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Romney is playing the strategy of courting millionaires and billionaires instead of votes, knowing that with enough money, votes can be won. Judging by the business climate of Home Depot and by the employee unfriendly approach of Bain Capital, it’s also pretty safe to assume that as business-friendly as the Obama administration has been, a Romney administration would be even more supportive of an increasingly anti-worker culture.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/03/15/home-depot-founder-virulently-anti-obama-could-race-be-to-blame/

I will shop elsewhere and encourage my friends and family to do the same.

I think it should be the employers choice as to if their employees should be allowed to represent a religion on the job.

Of course, government employees cannot represent any religion so that would be the exception.

The Doonesbury Comic Strip Republicans Don’t Want You To See: The Friday Edition
March 16, 2012
By Stephen D. Foster Jr.

In Thursday’s edition of Doonesbury, the state sanctioned rape of a woman seeking an abortion commenced on behalf of the GOP base. The doctor used a 10 inch “shaming wand” to perform a transvaginal ultrasound in an attempt to humiliate the poor woman into deciding against having an abortion. Today, the story continues.

Addicting Info has faithfully carried the Doonesbury abortion comic strip all week long. Why? Because many newspapers have decided that censoring this topic is a good way to keep people ignorant of what Republicans are doing to women’s rights. These so-called “news” organizations have failed to keep their readers informed because they would rather bow down to conservative demands. We here at AI reject such censorship and will continue to bring you the Doonesbury comic strip as long as this abortion segment continues. Republicans have declared war on women and everyone has the right to know exactly how the GOP is waging that war. To that end, Garry Trudeau decided to include the war in Doonesbury.


Today’s segment deals with the aftermath of the invasive ultrasound. The woman’s doctor tell her that she is now required to have an intimate with the fetus and that he must describe the fetus to her in detail. He goes on to describe the fetal features as nothing more than mere specks. In other words, a clump of cells that is not a person. The woman then takes a shot at Rick Perry. Check out the Friday strip along with all the others you may or may not have missed this week below.

Monday:

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Friday:

Republicans don’t want anyone to see this strip because they know it will draw the ire of much of the country. Women represent just over half of the national population, yet they are having virtually no say in what middle aged white male conservatives decide about their sex lives and medical privacy. It’s wrong and shouldn’t be tolerated. The only people who should be able to decide what is best for women’s bodies is women. Republicans have completely obliterated their claim of being the party that stands for small government the stays out of our lives. They’ve decided that small government should violate our privacy, force us to get medical procedures against our will and dictate what we do in our private lives with others. If that is their new definition of small government, I want no part of it. To combat this war on women and Republican censorship, please be sure to spread the word and share this with everyone you know. Women are counting on us to stand with them and their rights.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/03/16/the-doonesbury-comic-strip-republicans-dont-want-you-to-see-the-friday-edition/

I am so glad there are men like Justin on this planet.

Ladies, we are under attack.

Actually all the death penalty supporters who are holding this country back from being the best it could be should move their neandrathalic ***** out and let those of us who know better make it into an even better place to live.

More made up garbage as usual.

Considering most right wingers wouldn't know a liberal if one hugged them, that is remarkable huh?

So now we can end this conversation also since you cannot comprehend what I was saying here either. Carry on.

Again I wasn't discussing defective dna or the environmental influences that create criminals at all.

I was discussing the failed brain thought process that is stuck that makes people believe the death penalty solves anything.

It is a neandrathalic ideology that should have died with the dinosaurs.

I will allow nature to take care of that if it is how you say.

I am saying that neandrathalic tendencies in humans promote the death penalty. Their brains are stuck in the past.

Because I believe you are a man, you are being excused for your ignorance of what birth control is used for in woman's health since it is a lot more than just to prevent pregnancy. Women take them for all kinds of conditions and health issues.

Of course Limbaugh is too stupid and misogynistic to even make that a thought in his pickled brain.

Obama, if that is who you were speaking of, hasn't said anything sexist yet. So that isn't a discussion to be had.

I said neandrathalic tendencies that promote the death penalty, I didn't say anything about defective dna.

Oh but it does exist right now in this country.

Our police and fire departments, all of our social assistance programs, our tax assistance in the form of bankruptcy, etc... are all examples of socialism in a republic democracy.

Limbaugh is such a stupid drug addicted pig that he didn't even consider that her testimony wasn't even about herself and birth control. It was about her friends need for the birth control pills to control her ovarian cysts.

He is such a disgusting human being. It is hard for me to retain any hope for him to grow a brain.

No that is an ignorant right wing ideology. I believe all humans are capable of outgrowing the neandrathalic tendencies that promote the death penalty.

Okay so I see I am too advanced for you to understand, carry on....