As a conservative non-Us guy I’m surprised. If you can’t rush important legislation in your first year with enough votes on both houses, then you should be doing bi-partisan stuff all day long and twice on Sunday. Unless he spins it like Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, he’ll be effectively caving…unless he plan to regroup and get a kick-ass UHC that even Republicans can’t oppose.
Really “the US people would bein favour of it if not for the lying?” Is that the best reason you can get? …then I propose that voting should be limited to those who are immune to lying.
As an addendum to my last post I would also say that I wouldn’t be averse to seeing insurance companies being regulated in a manner similar to public utilities, where their profits are fixed.
And I note that you are carefully avoiding pointing out where I am wrong. Then again, I doubt you want to bring into the discussion the actual conditions people lived under without that evil government aid, back when it was concerned only with "maintaining order"and to hell with social justice. Noble sounding speeches about self reliance and personal responsibility are so much better right wing propaganda than talking about people in the Depression eating grass and bark or protesters being cut down by the US Cavalry.
If the only way to allow people with money to get good care is to prevent millions of people with less money from getting any care, I think we’d all be happy to see the rich die of horrible, debilitating diseases for a change.
Heck that’d open up opportunities for new people to build wealth and rise above the hoi polloi and their adequate health care*.
Of course, you know that the rich will always be able to purchase adequate health care, even if they have to fly to Dubai to get it. So your most important point is pretty lame on its face.
Insurance companies exist for one reason, and one reason only, to turn a profit.
Most civilized nations have long since realized that having healthcare in the hands of people whose only goal is to turn a buck off your chickenpox is a recipe for disaster. Here in America, we’ve simply becomed attached to the rolling disaster that is the current healthcare system.
*We’d have a never ending cycle of wealth and disease driving a bubbling core of American entrepreneurial innovation. The nation would become an unstoppable economic juggernaut!
Just happened upon this. The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association, Dr. Anne Doig, has this to say to about Canada’s health care system:
"Dr. Anne Doig says patients are getting less than optimal care and she adds that physicians from across the country - who will gather in Saskatoon on Sunday for their annual meeting - recognize that changes must be made.
“We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize,” Doing said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
“We know that there must be change,” she said. “We’re all running flat out, we’re all just trying to stay ahead of the immediate day-to-day demands.”
If somebody has to deny seeking an American type system, does that suggest to you glowing approval? An urgent desire to dismantle theirs and build it in our image?
With all due disgust at the abandonment of the most important platform plank of Obama’s campaign, I humbly submit: when has fair, honest and logical debate had any position in American politics?
It’s all about framing the debate, and as the electorate gets stupider and its attention span gets shorter, the Republican “two-words” policy* becomes a political weapon of mass destruction- unpleasant, but undeniably effective.
*The two-words policy is, of course, the ultimate in soundbite political strategy, and it works like this:
Identify policy/law/candidate you want to kill/change/discredit.
Come up with snappy two-word phrase to describe it in the least flattering manner possible. Bonus points if your phrase is substantially untrue or misleading but difficult to respond to in anything less than a full sentence. If you can’t use two words, one or three will do in a pinch. If you can’t describe a policy, describe its chief proponent.
Apply phrase to target. Preferably on TV, but in print will do. If all else fails, do it during a speech which will get mainstream media coverage.
Repeat as necessary.
Obviously, death panel was the killing joke in the latest round of the game, but “flip-flopper”, “un-”, “anti-” or “non-American”, “Big Government”, “socialist”, “gotcha media”, “ultra-liberal”, “soft on crime”, “your money”, “gay agenda”, “welfare queen”, “death tax”, “smoking gun”, etc. have all been extremely effective in the past.
As far as I’m concerned, it won’t be worth a shit. I understood (or it seems misunderstood) that the public option was meant to
give people a choice
provide a safety net for people who couldn’t get insurance (pre-existing conditions)
provide a safety net for people who lost their insurace due to layoffs etc
provide a safety net for people who lost their insurace becaue the company decided to cancel it.
They may as well scrap the whole thing I guess.
It has nothing to do with freedom, or fighting communism or stopping socialism. It damn sure has nothing to do with protecting us from govenment interference. It’s about which lobbyist is bankrolling which politician, which congresional slimeball is misinforming and then playing up to his base, and which groups stand to gain the most by peddling lies and getting people to hate other people.
It makes me want to puke.
I wonder who will be gloating if these people ever need serious healthcare and see the magic words REQUEST DENIED. You guys will have done it to yourselves.
Well, now, he wasn’t saying it was bad, or anything, he just brought those quotes to calm our hysterical enthusiasm for Canadian style medicine. Which is pretty common amongst those of us who see Obama as the Second Coming. As so many of us do.
Its perspective, Starv, perspective! The Canadian system isnt miraculous, its simply a vast improvement over the savage chaos that is ours. Obama isn’t Christ, its just that the comparison to Bush makes him seem like such a gift from Heaven. In that context, Carrot Top would look pretty good, so it doesn’t really say much…
Not at all. I’ll say the same thing to you I said to luci: their current system, one often lauded around here, is not working.
I didn’t suggest Canada is considering abandoning its system, nor that it should adopt the U.S. system.
If Canadian officials can find a way to make its system work better for its citizens, and they don’t resent the crappy way it’s working now, and they don’t resent how much better off they’d be if it was working well to begin with, and they are willing to trade their freedom and choice for nanny-state care, well, good for them, I guess.
As for me, I’d prefer alternatives that solve the problems that exist without government being the solution.
Well, we can safely conclude that the free market systems isn’t exactly going great. Kinda reminds me of pictures I saw of spider webs woven by spiders who had a whopping dose of LSD.
There are problems so big that only the government can handle, there isn’t anything else to do the job. The interstate highway system, Hoover Dam, the TVA…
Government is not an entity, Starv, it does not have pre-ordained qualities, it is entirely plastic, it is what we make it. If we are comfortable, apathetic and lazy, we get Bush. If we get off our dead asses and behave like citizens, there’s just no telling what we might be able to do.
Its true that in many places, many times, the citizen is the captive of his government. But it ain’t necessarily so, it is what we make it. I am not sure we can truly become the nation of Tom Paine’s dreams, and mine, but I am cold stone sure we can do a damn sight better than we have!
Agree, but with an added condition - they have less of a free hand in when/how they cancel accounts. There should be more oversight, and if necessary, more control.
We have the same system we’ve had for the last 233 years, which is that people who can get insurance use it when needed, and people who don’t do the best they can.
Now, I haven’t been around for most of those 233 years, but certainly the consensus among society for the time I have been around isn’t that the system we do have is savage chaos.
“Savage,” though it does have lesser meanings, carries with it for most people an implication of sadistic intent, which, though useful as a tool for inflammation upon people who are at an impressionable stage of life, is simply not true.
People fall through the cracks of fate. Approximately 40,000 people die in traffic accidents every year. Are their deaths attributable to savage chaos, or merely fate? When people find themselves with the inability to find or pay for health insurance (assuming they don’t actually have the money but decided to indulge in new cars, electronics, home furnishings and/or recreation instead) is that the result of savage chaos, or attributable merely to a string of choices they’ve made with regard to the education they pursued and/or the jobs they’ve decided to take?
And if people think they are covered for a condition that the terms of their policy does not in fact cover, are they the victims of savage chaos?
No. Again they are simply people who have not, for a variety of reasons, made choices that led to their having health coverage…just like people have been doing since the dawn of our country’s existence.
So then we come to where we are now, where people want and need health care but haven’t lived their lives in such a way as to provide it. So a solution needs to be found. But many people in this country think that a government solution is the wrong way to go, and their feelings are legitimate. They are not evil; they are not gloating over people not having health insurance; and they are not savage. They are simply people who feel that, based on past performance and their own desire for freedom from government intrusion upon their lives, some other solution is the answer.
Calling our current system “savage” – or even "chaos, given that for most people in this country health care is quite good – is inflammatory and tantamount to the kind of behavior we’ve been seeing recently at town hall meetings. And you think those kind of tactics are reprehensible, right?
I agree. I think there should be coverage for pre-existing and chronic conditions, and that it should be permanent (with the proviso that one can change companies but not opt out of the system once they’ve decided to join, upon pain of heavy financial penalty as I said above).
You should see fucking morons in action at another board where I post on this issue.
People on MEDICAID arguing that they don’t want government interference with health care.
People with Bipolar disorder arguing that they don’t want government making sure they can get get access to health care.
People who make under 30k a year and work at Wal Mart defending their right to pay thousands a year for half assed access to second rate health insurance.
People delighted at supposed their independence that they do not have health care because they can’t afford the six hundred dollars a month it would take to gain access.
Screw Obama if any of this is true. And screw all Republicans everywhere. A fertilized egg is sacred to them. An actual full grown human being can drop dead from breast cancer and that’s just the free market.
