I know how we can decide who is more entertaining or smarter, Rush Limbaugh or Jon Stewart! Have them debate each other! Oh. What do you mean Rush has never shared a stage or a microphone with someone who disagrees with him? Really? Can anyone find a liberal or a Democrat Rush has debated with equality in the microphone usage in the past few years? Past two decades? He is completely gutless and hasn’t done it. Hannity and Colmes doesn’t count, because Colmes was paid to take falls. The only right wing commentator who will even appear at a mike he doesn’t control is Bill O’Reilly. BO has appeared on the Daily Show, and Stewart, going very easy on him, makes him look foolish. Franken once share a panel with BO and BO lost his cool entirely. Anytime BO has a liberal on his program he shouts them down. But at least he will have a liberal on his program.
Really. You’ve never known anyone whose insurance company delayed payment or approval for care as long as they could. Or simply denied coverage for any reason they could think of. If that’s actually the case, well, rest assured your experience is far from typical.
Really. Or at least they’ve never mentioned it or expressed unhappiness in any way, other than perhaps the occasional complaint that they had to pay more out-of-pocket than they were expecting to pay.
There’s a student where I work right now for whom there are carwashes and bake sales and other fundraisers because he needs a kidney transplant. It’s not covered by his insurance because it’s a pre-existing condition when he switched from a job that didn’t pay the bills to a much better paying job with better insurance. He has a donor (a brother who’s a perfect match) but he’ll be indigent and deeply in debt while he recovers. Things like this make me sick to my stomach.
Yeah, that’s too bad. I hope he can get the operation he needs. But things like that happen. How is an insurance company supposed to avoid bankruptcy if it’s unblinkingly taking in and covering everyone who comes to it with a pre-existing condition? People paying no more than a few hundred dollars (and just as likely to move on afterwards) would immediately be getting operations and dental work and medications and such worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unless there was an offsetting and sudden uptick in clients to the tune of several orders of magnitude, they would be bankrupt in weeks – if they lasted even that long.
ETA: And that doesn’t even address the fact that many people would undoubted sign up in order to get whatever they needed and drop their coverage afterward to save the cost of the policy. Then the next time they get sick, they sign up again, get the care they need, and drop back out again. Rinse and repeat as needed to get tons of coverage while paying the absolute minimum.
All in all, coverage of pre-existing conditions is impossible without shifting the burden onto taxpayers…and we all know how we feel about that!
Yeah, less scared of becoming indigent or bankrupt. Horrible stuff.
Look, what you want basically is a free ride. You want to be covered no matter what and you want everybody else to shoulder that burden for you. The trade-off for that is long waits for care from an underfunded, unaccountable government beaurocracy, under which just as many people if not more are likely to suffer in pain, or to die waiting on treatment, or from being denied treatment, as die from having no coverage at all. Maybe more. UHC will not solve the problem of people not getting the care they need. It will only create a different set of circumstances under which unfairness, suffering and death occur.
Given that most people are well covered now, and that I also believe relying on the government ultimately makes serfs of us all, I’m not willing to make that trade-off.
For the love of fuck, you have yet to offer ANY evidence that the federal government would be worse at providing health care than private insurance companies. And no, “government is evil and incompetent olol” does not count.
Even though your opinions are horrible and misguided, I will give you credit for one thing: you can always steer a thread in whatever direction you want.
Health care debates are in other threads. This thread is for a) the demise of the 4th estate and b) how Stewart/Colbert seem to be the only ones left defending it.
I want that in roughly the same way you want these people to “die and decrease the surplus population”. Are you saying that they should be at best beggared and at worst allowed to die rather than the taxpayers having to pay for a safety net that could apply to us all? There’s not a person on this board who couldn’t lose their health insurance tomorrow through absolutely no fault of their own. Looking at it selfishly, we’ve paid hundreds of billions for a pointless war that’s benefited nobody save for a few contractors, we’ve paid hundreds of billions for bailouts, why not pay hundreds of billions for something we might actually benefit from?
I’ve never said government was evil. Accusing one’s opponents of evil is a lib/Dem tactic.
And I have offered evidence more than a few times around here that the federal government would be worse at providing health care than private insurance companies. See my comments on what posters from Canada and the U.K. have had to say about the waits and lack of funding their systems are facing. See statistics all over the place about how most Americans are happy/satisfied with the health care and coverage they already have.
I can always tell when I’m starting to score points – people start coming out of the woodwork to assail me for rebutting off-topic comments, rather than assailing the posters who made the off-topic comments (which coincidentally they happen to agree with) that I’m rebutting in the first place.
So the recent comparisons by Fox News and countless toothless protesters of Obama to Hitler and government healthcare to National Socialism is a comparison to the good things that Hitler did like rebuilding the German economy and revolutionizing Berlin architecture and inadvertently giving the U.S. the edge in the space race later on and the like? It’s been a compliment all this time?
I waited about 6 months to get an appointment with a cancer dermatologist. It was benign but I got to stew for a long time.
First of all, Sampiro, I regard you as one of the good guys around here. I have no beef with you; it was GIGObuster I was responding to in the quote you posted.
Now, having said that, I regard the fact that people may lose their health care tomorrow as being a consequence of fate - similar to their losing their income tomorrow, or their homes or apartments tomorrow, or their car, or their food, or any of the other things that people need in order to live. Shit happens. And unless you’re in favor of a system of government that supplies everyones’ needs, how does one distinguish which of these items people are left to fend for themselves on and which are everyone else’s responsibility?
The very fact that people on your side of the argument are framing it in this way is what makes me see 100% full-blown socialism on the horizon, with 100% full-blown communism taking its place when it fails, as it ultimately must because people being what they are, socialism reaches a breaking point and is unsustainable forever.
Ahem…well, I, at least, was not in favor of the bailouts. 
With regard to the war, it’s arguable whether it benefitted nobody or whether it has accomplished a great deal of good in terms of national security and in stabilizing the region. But aside from that, it’s apples and oranges. I don’t happen to think anything with regard to the Iraq war vs. UHC, except to say that the left has long favored drastic reductions in defense spending in order to shift that money to social programs, and I oppose that two ways: one, I think people sacrifice freedom and that the wrong type of society is created when people have to look to their government to take care of them; and two, the U.S., much of the Europe and the western world and pockets of the Middle East and Near East are free and secure thanks to the might and technological developments of the U.S. military. The benefit that we all derive as the result of our defense spending is incalculable.
Not quite as serious but I have Blue Cross/Blue Shield (the universal solvent of insurance) and it took me about 2 months just to get a GP appointment; most doctors were no longer taking new patients and those who were have long waiting list. When toxoplasmosis caused excruciating pain in my eye I had to go to a doc-in-the-box because my GP couldn’t work me in and I was afraid the ER would cost a fortune since it didn’t involve a life or death emergency or arterial spray, and when it flared again it took me 3 weeks to see a doctor (luckily it wasn’t painful so much as blurry by then, but it did enough damage in those 3 weeks to change my eyeglass prescription).
That’s what I don’t understand about people who seem to think that currently if you’ve got health insurance you’re fine and dandy. Michael Moore’s movie Sicko (which I know was partisan and the information selective and the participants carefully chosen but still there were some undeniable facts presented) was ONLY about people who already have health insurance and thought they were fully covered until they needed something major.
Okay, granted…some of us protray UHC as evil. Seriously. I’ll retract my comment about that being exclusively a Democratic tactic. I don’t watch/listen to those guys and so they’re off my radar. I can tell you that neither I nor any of the other conservatives I’ve known in my own life think of liberals or their goals as ‘evil.’ Wrong-headed, naive, selfish and confiscatory, maybe. But not evil.
I don’t know where you live or what you’re circumstances were (no dough for the appointment, maybe?), but provided you make payment arrangements of some sort, I’m confident I could get you an appointment with a dermatologist specializing in cancer here in the good-sized midwestern city I live in within a couple of weeks if not days.
And now, sorry guys, I have to bail for now (Thus making ZebraShaSha happy. 
)
I’ll try to answer anything else you want to ask (assuming you do) later.
It will not be a free ride, what we have now is the gangster version of “taking you for a ride” in health care insurance and coverage.
Income expenditures on health care in the U.S. are likely to rise from a current level of about 15 percent to about 29 percent of GDP in 2040.
What you are ignoring also is that UHC is not unaccountable, I lost count on the many cites from right wingers reporting how terrible health care is on developed nations with UHC only to follow the cites and finding that in almost all cases the pressure from the citizens helped the people in the citations.
By contrast, all the private health care insurers that were subpoenaed by the US congress showed how accountable they are to the American citizen:
Guys, you’re forgetting: OMG SOCIALISM!!11!
I said that already.
(Okay, okay, I’m out!)
Back to the OP, one of my favorite things about Jon Stewart is his interviews with authors. I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw an author interviewed on any CNN or FOX show unless it was a new book about Anna Nicole Smith or Michael Jackson (and God help us all if they ever learn Anna Nicole was Blanket’s mother). Stewart interviews authors who are heads of state, the guy who wrote the expose’ of Blackwater, historians, economists, etc… The other night not only did he interview Chris McDougall (author of a new book about the Mexican Indian ultramarathon runners) but it was clear that if he hadn’t read the book itself then he at least was very familiar with it; can you even imagine Larry King or Lou Dobbs or Glenn Beck doing that?