Wright’s role clarified

actorman.....you betray your own ignorance when you say I'm a facist........Facism is leftist.......Did Hitler nationalize everything? Um......yeah

Go back to school.......apparently you didn't learn your lessons.

To borrow from Mangino, bayarea....."There are certain students that I can't fix in 4 years of college whose parents screwed them up over the previous 18 years".

November 22, 2009 at 5:55 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Brown lauds KU’s Mangino

Pacer......if Heminway were still the Chancellor, your comment may have had some value.

lighthawk.....you were the one saying before the game that KU was going to win....over and over and over on every football thread. We're supposed to believe your analysis of KUvMU now? Texas didn't triple team Meier and most of the night they never double teamed him. They have superior athletes that can hang with Meier. I would be more worried about OUR ability to hang with Danario Alexander next week than their ability to cover Meier or Briscoe. All I know is you throw out the records in this rivalry--and it's a good thing for us this year.

Get a win for the Big Man. Thanks for all you've done, Coach.

November 22, 2009 at 2:25 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Wright’s role clarified

troutsee........A few comments:

1) Lew has been good for KU. Without him we would be near the bottom of the Big 12 in revenue and budget.

2) I wasn't addressing the issue of access, but I will now. This argument is a red herring. Everyone has access to medical care. People like you and me PAY for the access of homeless, indigents, and those who generally don't take care of their own responsibility to have coverage. We pay through higher costs of procedures and higher insurance costs. Of course there will always be the truly needy among us who--through no fault of their own--need assistance, but putting EVERYONE on the government dole to pay for healthcare because there are some people you falsely perceive to have no access to healthcare? Come on. I can see you are trained in medicine and not in economics, philosophy or logic.

3) If Medicare is so efficient, why is it one of the big socialist programs that is about to bankrupt our country? What about the billions of dollars of fraud in the Medicare program that has been exposed? I don't buy your argument that it's "the most efficient medical insurance company in the United States". First of all, it's not medical insurance--let's call it what it really is: redistribution of wealth. The government charges a huge payroll tax to gainfully-employed citizens and shifts that money to elderly people who were not able to save enough to pay for their own healthcare needs, in part because of excessive government taxation.

4) "People would be in a terrible fix if it weren't for Medicare". Would they? I guess we don't know for sure. What if we never had Medicare in the first place? That would have been ideal. Then people would have made RATIONAL decisions about their healthcare before they became senior citizens and would have seen to their OWN care rather than relying on 20-somethings to pay their medical bills. Medicare is a government "pass the buck" program that passes personal responsibility to the next generation. How rational is that?? How efficient is that??

5) The only way you're going to increase access is to control costs and make them reasonable so poor people can afford to go to the doctor for preventive care and basic healthcare needs. Taxing corporations and the "wealthy" to pay for the healthcare of the poor isn't the answer--it is proven that corporations pass on their taxation costs to employees and consumers in the form of lower salaries and higher costs of goods and services. When the creators of wealth have

November 22, 2009 at 2:16 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

KU football kicker: ‘Stay slow, stay balanced’

Branstetter sucks, plain and simple. He can't kick with any depth or any height on kickoffs. You have to have one or the other or you need a different kicker. If he would hit it into the endzone, we wouldn't have to worry about him making tackles on kickoffs. He's a huge part of why our special teams are subpar this year.

I'll give him credit on that long field goal--nice work there. But I dont' want my kicker making tackles because that means he probably didn't have enough depth to get a touchback OR he didn't have enough height to let his coverage team get in place to make the play.

November 22, 2009 at 12:54 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Wright’s role clarified

Sorry to highjack this sports venue for healthcare talk, but I can't stand to let the words of people stand uncontested who don't think through the issues logically, fail to identify the true problem and fail to propose solutions that actually remedy the problem. We have enough of those people in Congress already. It's time for clear-thinking Americans to stand up and put them in their place.

Now back to your straw man argument about your poor grandpa who made anonymous gifts to KU: I have made enough anonymous gifts in my life to know that they are not "untraceable". If he wanted to create a paper trail for all his donations, he could do it. That's your grandpa's fault, not Lew Perkins' fault. (Aside: "victimhood"--it's not my fault--is another of the great weaknesses of our culture today.)

November 22, 2009 at 12:49 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Wright’s role clarified

You misstated the problem at hand: you couched it in terms of the quality of healthcare and the health of the citizens. Your family members that are docs would take issue with your assessment. We have a greatest health care system in the world. The problem is spiralling costs, which can be addressed by a) getting rid of group health insurance plans, b) tort reform to protect docs from frivolous law suits, c) refusing to pay the bill for illegal immigrants and deporting them when they are exposed in the healthcare system.

And if socialized medicine were truly a better system that produces healthier people, why do Canadians and English and Europeans and people from all over the world come to the USA to get a higher quality of health care?

November 22, 2009 at 12:43 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Wright’s role clarified

There's no incentive to find the doctor/hospital with the most cost-effective surgery because the consumer only has to pay his little $25 co-pay. There is probably a doc that would do the surgery for only $5000 IF a) he didn't have to fill out all those forms you talked about, and b) he didn't have to worry about the trial lawyers suing him for every penny he has.

We have to get back to individual responsibility for healthcare costs and get rid of the group insurance plans. That's the only way we can incentivize consumers to seek a) wellness/prevention programs, b) the most cost-effective treatment.

You would think it insane to have a "group car buying program" where you just paid a $25 co-pay to buy a brand new Mercedes while the true cost of the car was passed on to your employer and the insurance company, who in turn passed it back to you in the form of lower wages and higher premiums. So why is it sane to have a "group health insurance program"??

November 22, 2009 at 12:38 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Wright’s role clarified

bayareaj.....Yeah, the government does soooo well running Medicare and the wealth restribution program called Social Security we want them running healthcare, too.

You ARE right that the insurance piece is one of the biggest culprits in spiralling healthcare costs. But the fix is to get rid of the "group health plans" that are so counter-productive, not having the government run the program. Group plan members can have an elective surgery done for a $25 co-pay that costs "someone" $10,000 or more. That "someone" is their employer and the insurance company that administer's their group health plan. The employer and insurance company pass the cost along to the employee/group plan member in the form of a) lower wages on the part of the employer and b) higher premiums on the part of the insurance company. (Aside: liberals don't seem to get the fact that there exist no costs or taxes that are NOT passed down to the individual consumer. All tax increases or cost increases are therefore charged to the "little man". All corporate taxes are passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices for goods and services. All insurance cost increases are passed on to the consumer in the form of lower wages and higher premiums.

November 22, 2009 at 12:36 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

Wright’s role clarified

You people who don't like Lew are probably the same ones who want socialized healthcare to be forced on us. The thing they have in common is they resent "money people" and are jealous of "rich people". They want others to pay their way, but what they fail to acknowledge is that if the money people didn't pay the lion's share, we wouldn't have the facilities or the money to pay the salaries of Mangino or Self. Without a money guy like Lew, KU athletics would be even further behind the big boys in the Big 12.

If Lew had failed to investigate this situation after the complaints from a player's parent cracked open the door to alleged abuse, you same people would be crying that Lew is a horrible human being because he doesn't care for the student athletes. He did exactly what he needed to do under the circumstances. There's no way you can expect a players meeting to be kept hush-hush because some of the kids want Mangino fired. But without having a meeting, Lew couldn't determine the severity of the alleged problem.

November 22, 2009 at 11:52 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )

On target

TT needs to improve his lateral speed/quickness to be a perimeter stopper. I can't see him doing it within this season. I thought we'd see a higher level of play out of him right out of the gate this season after seeing the reports of his summer with the national team. He has the length like RussRob, but not the cat-like quickness of RR or Mario. The only kid on our roster that reminds me of RR or Mario is Elijah.

CJ has some rust to knock off before we can judge whether he is quick enough to be a perimeter stopper on D. They say he's 6'4.......looks closer to 6'2.

November 21, 2009 at 12:50 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )