Moore was just turning the Republican attacks on Democrats back at them for opposing the war. Remember how people who opposed the war were being accused of treason and such? I do. Quite vividly.
But as I’ve said earlier, I think it’s more justified to freak out about war, with the attendent deaths and all, then over a Health Care Reform bill. One is substantially more hyperbolic than the other. I’ve seen not a single shred of credible evidence (just scaremongering) that the health care reform bills running through Congress is going to cause a net increase in deaths. Not all freakouts are created equal.
Where exactly are the mass graves in Europe of people who died from botched government run healthcare? I wish I could just get you conservatives to admit that government healthcare won’t kill a bunch of people. You can feel free to ideologically oppose it all you want, but at least concede that for me. Please?
No, I don’t agree. I don’t go for guilt by association, and I don’t think every member of a political party, or group, or large movement, is responsible for the behavior of every other member of the group.
I am willing to concede that for every Rush Limbaugh there is a Michael Moore. That for every Michelle Bachman there is an Al Sharpton. That for every lunatic with an Obama=Hitler sign, there was a lunatic with a Bush=Hitler sign.
But what seems different to me this time around is that mainstream republican politicians are playing along with the dishonesty and the distortions and the rabble-rousing.
There are a handful of republicans in congress who are putting up honest, good-faith arguments in the health-care debate - but they are a tiny minority. The rest seem happy to ride the Crazy Wave. I’ll confess that it troubles me a lot.
It depends.
If the dems really screw this up (and there is a pretty good chance that they will), the pubs will get back in and it will be a different crowd with pitchforks and torches and political discourse will slowly spiral down the drain.
If the dems succeed (economy recovers, sensible health plan passes, sensible energy policy, happy endings in Iraq & Afghanistan etc) - or even if they only screw it up a little bit - I think we’ll see a dramatic realignment of politics. In that climate, there would be room for a new centerist party (non-authoritarian, small-government, pro-business, free-market, secular - readers of The Economist and their ilk) to be successful.
They might not succeed first time out the gate, but I bet they could make some dramatic inroads in congress and be a credible third party in a future election.
Those numbers are calculated based on administrative costs vs money payed out. Medicare pays out far more per person than private companies, because it deals mostly with seniors,disabled, etc. Private insurers, on the other hand, have a large number of healthy people enrolled. They still need to administer the plans, but they make very little payouts for them. As a result, medicare has much higher admin costs per person, but lower admin costs per dollar payed out. To me, it makes more sense to use the former calculation.
He didn’t do that deliberately. It was the mighty wind off his keyboard as he started all those threads on good points made by DU posters, coupled with all those times he started threads on good points made by liberal posters here, couple with all those times he has just said the words “good point” to liberals.
Sure, there was implications to that effect from the Hannity/Coulter crowd, just as there routinely is from the Olberman/Moulitsas crowd. Assholes behave assholishly. Sadly the assholes on both sides are numerous enough that the pols think it necessary to court their favor, and they’re probably right, since we’ve seen the extremists of both parties take aim at their own more moderate members.
You do. I don’t.
Three answers:
It’s hard to show the graves for the people who don’t die because of medical innovation. One of the biggest objections to government-run healthcare is it reduces the incentives for doctors and medical corporations to develop new treatments. See this and especially this.
Deaths are not the only measure of a heathcare system. They are the easiest to measure, and the one that will get the most headlines, but other things count, too. When you spend a year waiting for a treatment that lives you in severe pain, or immobile or whatever, IMO that’s not much different from dying a year earlier. Even long waiting lists for less-serious conditions are not unimportant, IMO.
By far most importantly: I think government-run healthcare will fundamentally alter the relationship between the people and the government, in a permanent way. IMO it will, frankly be the end of any hope of returning to the free and self-reliant citizenry the founding fathers intended. We’re headed that way anyway, and it’s probably more or less inevitable, but that doesn’t
I’m not uninformed, I’m not stupid, I’m not astroturfed, and, contrary to what the President has said, I’m not failing to live up to a divine mandate. I’m also not alone in thinking that inserting the government into people’s medical decisions is a landmark point on the road to serfdom. Some liberals like to talk about the importance of keeping “your laws off my body.” I agree with them.
You no doubt feel differently, and that’s fine. But this is about what those of us who oppose government-run healthcare think. And yes, I do think it is every bit as important an issue as one of war and peace.
I’m curious how the 1.9 millionFederal employees feel about their Federally provided insurance plans - seeing as they are leading the way down the road to serfdom.
Or maybe the 1,454,515active duty service members suffering under the yoke of Federally provided health care. Or the 848,000active reserves. Or the 26 million veterans, painfully aware no doubt, of their loss of freedom at the hands of their Federally provided healthcare (within limits). I wonder how they feel about sacrificing their self-reliance.
Providing healthcare insurance for the ~1% of the population that are government employees is one thing; insuring a hundred times that number and putting us on the road toward UHC is another thing entirely, and it’s what’s being discussed here.
I’m also OK with the government issuing uniforms and assault rifles to the military, but I wouldn’t be OK with that for the rest of the population.
I’m aware of the current proposals. I’m also well aware that
government programs have a near-universal tendency to metastasize and grow far beyond their original intent
many of the people pushing this program, including the president, have repeatedly stated that what they really want is universal single-payer, and that some of them have said that a “public option” is a means to that end
simply on its own terms, the program stands to grow enormously over time as employers increasingly opt to cut costs by not offering coverage, and put more and more people on the public teat
I do not think that a government-run healthcare insurance program will ever be self-finacing. In fact, I find the idea laughable. It will inevitably become a vast means for transferring wealth and creating bureaucracy.
Senator DeMint (R-South Carolina) has proposed giving out vouchers to individuals who can’t afford it to purchase private health insurance.
What would you think of a bill that incorporated Demint’s proposal alongside a Public Option? Individuals could decide for themselves, instead of relying on employers, what plan they want. For or against?
It’d be an improvement , but there are plenty of better options that have already been put out there. A far better and far simpler solution is to involve the government only in catastrophic care (i.e. when a stroke or an accident or some debilitating condition suddenly leaves someone with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills), and 100% uninvolved in routine care for anyone except those already on medicare/medicaid. For medical bills under, say, $50-100,000, I think the government should have no role whatsoever.
Your solution is utterly inadequate and does little to address the problem of the 15% of the population that’s uninsured. If somebody can’t afford private coverage for non-catastrophic care, they certainly aren’t going to afford a 50k hospital bill. And the poor with medical problems will still wait and wait until it gets so bad they have to go to the emergency room, then they will be hit with a bill that they aren’t going to be able to pay anyway and the price will nonetheless be passed on to the public.
Apples and oranges. On one hand, you’ve got a popular radio personality who hosts a daily show listened to by millions and who has struck the fear of God into his party if anyone criticizes him. On the other, you have a documentary filmmaker who makes a movie once every few years and who has zero power or influence within his party.
On one hand, you have an elected congresswoman who frequently and actively speaks for the GOP. And on the other, a non-elected self-appointed spokesman who has very few apologists within the Democratic party.
It’s telling that when trying to draw up true comparisons, one can’t. There’s nobody who spreads so much vitriol in such a high-profile venue and has so much sway over the Dems like Limbaugh does. And while I entertain the possibility that there might be a Democratic congressperson who’s as rabidly delusional and inflammatory as Bachman, they certainly aren’t a household name.
A majority of those currently uninsured include illegal aliens, those who choose to be uninsured, and those already eligible for medicaid/medicare. I’m not opposed in principle to expanding medicaid coverage to get more of the working poor.
The vast majority of people would have it through their employers, as they do now. Many more would have it as employers started offering health insurance now that they could afford to. And individual gap coverage policies with deductibles – covering, say, expenses from $1000 to 50,000 – would be quite affordable.
A huge portion of our current heath care expenditures comes from a relatively small number of cases where patients incur huge bills; these are also the situations that most Americans worry about. Most people also think that more routine-care insurance should be available to those who cannot afford it
The solution, then should do three things:
Insure everybody against life-changing catastrophic care
Do more to help the ~5% of Americans who want but cannot afford routine-care insurance
Do nothing that is going to interfere with the status quo for the vast majority of people who are happy with what they have now and do not want to change it.
Create as little new federal spending as possible.
Despite protestations to the contrary, I am not persuaded that the “public option” will satisfy either #3 or #4; indeed I think it will fail them dramatically. Every independant analysis I know of (such as the CBO) indicates that is the case.
