For some reason, it had slipped my mind until just now that for all your carping about my cite, you gave none at all for your claim.
Given that fact, it’s kind of odd that you would say:
BTW, as much as you’d like to dismiss a counterargument for no good reason, this is no ‘minor tangent’ or ‘pedantic nitpick,’ to use your words. Your position, AFAICT, is that SCHIP’s already more or less at the ideal coverage level - that it would be bad if children currently eligible were dropped, but it would also be bad to expand eligibility.
To point out that a good part of what the present bill does is to provide funding for children already eligible whose SCHIP participation would otherwise be unfunded, speaks directly to your objection to this bill, based on the position you hold.
Could you please quote yourself where you did so? I’ve read through your subsequent posts three times now, and whatever you’re talking about, I don’t see it at all.
I gave due credit to Andrew Cuomo for his Charles Hynes appointment. I indicated that the office that handled Medicaid fraud investigations didn’t seem to be making much of a dent under Spitzer when he was Attorney General. I did blame Pataki and the legislature for their role in the mess, as well as federal regulators who haven’t been watching the store either.
Right there, there is where blame lies. A problem this big doesn’t spring up all on its own, you know. It has a lot of fathers. And it sure will take more than just Andrew Cuomo and Charles Hynes to fix this mess.
In the case of total system failure, which the New York Medicaid system sure represents in my eyes, parsing blame by percentages seems worthless to me. This one has the greasy fingerprints of both parties and opportunists in the public and private sector who exploited every weakness they could.
Given that, it would be more productive to fix the system and then police it so that it continues to run well. New York actually made progress on this front before, so perhaps they can do so again.
However, the finger-pointing that you immediately engaged in when learning of the problem (even before knowing much about it, plainly) isn’t productive. Better to give people a stake in fixing the mess than an interest in dodging the blame - especially here, where the blame is pretty much general.
Now, your behavior when confronted with this issue was to deny that people like Spitzer and Cuomo had any involvement at all. That’s clearly wrong, and you ought to own up to that.
OK, forget I asked. What bullshit. First you complain that I’ve misinterpreted you by saying you’re assigning blame evenly to both parties, then when I give you the opportunity to correct it, you want my answer to your bullshit question first, and then when I do that for you (not that I owe you anything) finally you dodge and refuse to correct the very misapprehension you were griping about so you can just rant a bit.
I’ll just go with 90-10, between the person who’s actually responsible, being the chief executive of the state and all, v, the guy who’s supposed to investigate any number of things, including the state government’s fuckups.
Which reminds me, why don’t you start another Pit thread? You were Brave Sir Robin in the last one. I think you stuck around for one word - “Cite?” - after the OP. Maybe you can get up to a whole sentence, with subject and verb, next time.
So if you didn’t deny it, you sure were scrambling to shift blame over to any Republican you could find. You breezed right by any suggestion that the New York Attorney General, who explicitly handles these cases, ought to have done a better job at it. Certainly Spitzer was effective when prosecuting matters he cared about.
Cuomo seems to be making steps to improve the performance of the office on this score, as I have said. That is laudable, and necessary, and implies that there was room for improvement, doesn’t it?
I won’t defend Pataki or the Republican controlled New York State Senate on this matter, and I don’t see where you can defend Spitzer, the Assembly, and a few other Democrats I could name on this particular issue. And merely saying so doesn’t make one any less a Democrat or a supporter of Medicaid. Who the hell likes Medicaid fraud?
I don’t agree with this at all, and I’m shocked that so many of my fellow liberals here seem willing to let it pass.
Ordinary individuals who merely contribute personal anecdotes to particular political causes are certainly not “volunteering for scrutiny”, and it is not “legitimate” to broadcast personal information about their incomes or where they live, etc. It’s an unwarrantable intrusion on their privacy.
If you’re concerned about fraud in a particular government entitlement program, you should be investigating that overall, not digging around in the personal lives of individual “poster children” for the program. Ordinary citizens are not public figures, and providing a personal story to a political group or cause shouldn’t expose one to the kind of prying scrutiny that public figures have to endure.
I can well imagine the outrage that conservatives would express if liberals tried a similar public investigation campaign on private individuals who lent their names and personal histories to a PR event for a Republican cause. Consider, for example, the touching story told by one Robert McFadden at a press conference for Bush’s Social Security privatization plan:
Did anybody chase down Mr. McFadden’s family history to verify that his father did in fact die at age 57? Or that Mr. McFadden was there to see it? Or that Mr. McFadden’s family did not in fact qualify for SS survivor benefits? Did liberal pundits discuss his widowed mother’s financial circumstances in editorial columns or blogs?
No, because that would be fucking disgusting. When an ordinary individual is recruited to tell their personal story for a political cause, the story is nothing more than an illustration, an advertisement. If you don’t think that illustration/advertisement correctly reflects the general facts about the cause, what you should do is expose those general facts, and confront the politicians who are trying to spin them. E.g., it’s fair game to point out something like “In contrast to Mr. McFadden’s anecdotal evidence, over 98% of families whose breadwinner dies at age 57 qualify for survivor benefits” [statistics made up for purposes of illustration].
But you shouldn’t go digging for falsehoods in the private citizen’s anecdote itself, because it’s just one story, and its factuality has very little bearing on the overall validity of the cause. To pry into a private citizen’s personal life and make the details public in the hopes of catching them in a falsehood, just so you can embarrass the politicians and the political cause that recruited them, is, as I said, fucking disgusting.
In the case of this OP, it is fucking disgusting that conservative media vultures undertook a public “scrutiny” of the Frosts’ financial circumstances. Not just that some of them told lies about it; not just that some wingnuts intruded on the Frosts with emails and phone calls; not just that anonymous nutjobs spewed hatred and contempt at them on the internet; but the very fact that the Frosts’ personal circumstances were publicly “scrutinized” at all is absolutely despicable. I think everybody who participated in or condoned this sneaky, stalky, sordid endeavor should be ashamed of themselves.
Yeah, quoting stuff I said before my alleged denial happened really buttresses your case. :rolleyes:
You want to tag me with something quite desperately, don’t you? “You denied this!” “You need to own up to that!” You’ve been doing this all year, and every time, it turns out to be bullshit.
This time, you had to lie about what I said to make it work. Did you think that page 2 of this thread was no longer accessible? Maybe you should check the assertions you make before you simply spout off.
You may not like what I say, but at least I stated it in terms of questions and skeptical reaction, rather than assertion.
And you seem to want to ignore that as of the time of our only good cite about this stuff, Republicans had been running NY state - hence, running the fraud-riddled, mismanaged program you’re going on about - for the past 10.5 years.
But nooooooooooo, it’s not the fault of the people actually in charge of it, we’ve got to find a Democrat to share the blame.
From Spitzer’s entry in Wikipedia:
Fact is, neither you know nor I know exactly who was *supposed *to be investigating Medicaid fraud - the state AG or the U.S. Attorney, or who. But you want to pin it on Spitzer, so nothing will stop you. You even toss in the state legislature, which could have - what? - passed a law banning fraud?
But it’s an irrevocable fact that from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 2006, George Pataki was the chief executive of New York state. The mismanaged, fraud-ridden agency reported to him. He had executive responsibility over it.
But for you, the buck doesn’t stop there; for you, it makes more stops than a downtown bus.
But why am I bothering with this? I’m keeping you from your lying and finger-pointing and running away. Have a good day.
I guess we have to disagree about this. They volunteered to have their personal story told publicly. They volunteered to emerge from the anonymity that other MCHP recipients retain. They were using their personal story to push for an expansion of this program. They were not using policy arguments. Since the only reason they put forth for supporting this program is their personal story, they opened up that story to scrutiny.
They made themselves public figures by volunteering to have their story used publicly by the Democrats. They chose to put their kid on the radio. They chose to shill publicly for this program. That makes them public figures.
Well, as one of those fellow liberals, i guess i should respond.
This family didn’t simply “contribute personal anecdotes.” They agreed to let their son read out a statement, prepared by Democratic senate staffers, over the radio during a time reserved for a political Democratic radio address. If a political party with access to the airwaves cedes its radio time to me so that i can read out a statement supporting the party’s position on an important piece of legislation, then i’ve made myself part of the public political debate, and should be as liable to scrutiny as anyone else in that debate.
But it wasn’t just about fraud. It was a question of whether the SCHIP program is helping the right people. As far as i can tell, the conservatives who are focusing on the Frosts are NOT arguing that they defrauded the system, but that they are an example of what is wrong with the system because they are too wealthy to need government help. I happen to disagree with that argument, as i’ve made clear in this thread already, but that argument is not the same as alleging fraud.
Also, the whole"poster children" aspect of the Frost’s exposure invites public scrutiny. What the Democrats, and the Frosts themselves, are saying is, in effect, “Look at this family. This is the type of people that the SCHIP program helps. How could anyone deny the benefits of a program that helps people like this?” I think that, in a case like this, it’s not unreasonable to ask whether those people really needed help. I happen to believe that they did, and that the people who are saying they are too “rich” for the program are a bunch of whiny bitches who are, in many cases, distorting the picture of the Frosts’ financial position.
I don’t know, but if they had i would also think it a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
I’m sure you’re right that many conservatives would express outrage at such a thing, but i’ve come to accept that many conservatives are worthless hypocrites who are happy to say one thing and do another, depending on what serves their cause. But just because they are hypocrites doesn’t mean i have to be. I think that scrutinizing people who voluntarily enter the public sphere is legitimate, no matter which political party they support.
But, if making a general rather than a specific argument is the more desirable course of action, why doesn’t that also apply to the whole use of “poster children”?
If the SCHIP program is a good one, for example (and i think it is), then why can’t the Democrats convince us of that using general arguments about the overall program, rather than parading a 12-year-old child on national radio? If social security privatization is a good thing, why can’t Bush make that argument without parading the son of a dead father at a press conference?
Well, again, i’ll ask: if the individual story’s “factuality has very little bearing on the overall validity of the cause,” why do political parties constantly trot out these poster children? They do it because it works as a political strategy, and as such i believe that it should be as open to public and journalistic scrutiny as any other political strategy.
I disagree. The lies and misrepresentations are wrong, but the scrutiny itself is not, IMO.
Since you’re doing such a good job of bending over backwards to be fair (and you are), maybehaps you should amend your statement to include all people rather than targeting just conservatives? There are plenty of liberals who “are worthless hypocrites who are happy to say one thing and do another, depending on what serves their cause”, Christ RTFirefly who is the poster child for that has been posting incessantly in this thread. If you’re going to be fair about it, be fair all the way.
Well, I certainly haven’t defended Pataki on this issue, have I. But he certainly couldn’t have cleaned up the problem singlehandedly - after all, the unit that handles investigating Medicaid fraud is run by the office of the Attorney General, per my cite.
Sure. They had responsibility over the system - they could have made changes to it to tighten eligibility and expand enforcement of fraud penalties.
And as I mentioned, Spitzer was supposed to be investigating this. Yet fraud is still a major problem, and Andrew Cuomo (himself a Democrat) seems to be trying to do things differently than Spitzer, going so far as to hire the guy who made New York’s Medicaid Fraud unit a model program in the 1970s and 1980s. (Newsflash - he’s a Democrat as well, and one of the most successful and no-nonsense DAs in the country, in many ways a public-service model.)
Another newsflash - Spitzer was Attorney General from 1999 until early this year. So Republicans weren’t running everything - they weren’t running his office that investigates this kind of fraud.
No, because in this particular instance i was talking about conservatives. They are the people who are misrepresenting the Frosts’ situation.
That’s not to deny that there are liberal hypocrites. But, when i’m talking conservative hypocrites, then that’s who i’m going to specify, and i have no particular desire to amend every single statement about conservative hypocrites with a qualifying statement about liberals just to satisfy your own Fox-inspired interpretation of what constitutes fairness and balance.
<smile> “Fox-inspired”. I like that. One of these days I’m going to have to actually watch Fox News just so that kind of attempt at an insult will have some factual basis.
