What’s hurting people is the high cost of health care. This bill does nothing to address that. Health care costs will continue to rise, and Obamacare will add to the deficit just like Medicare does.
Y’all are easily pleased, or easily bamboozled, as the case may be. This was, for Democrats, “the perfect storm”. A liberal Democrat in the White House, veto-proof margins in the House and Senate - the first chance in a generation where the Dems could really bring about all the wonderful stuff they kept saying they wanted. Fix global warming, repeal “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, health care for all, soak the rich, fix the deficit, green energy, gay marriage -
And this is what they came up with. A hugely expensive bill that doesn’t cover all the uninsured, does nothing to fix health care inflation, and adds millions of people to a bankrupting system.
The quintessential Democratic achievement. Congratulations.
If the debate about the Fourth Amendment was honest and rational, it would have been repealed years ago, because all it does it save criminals from getting convicted when their contraband is found through a search that is deemed “illegal.”
Or may not. Maybe any debate about the Fourth Amendment recognizes that there are benefits to preventing the government from searching you and your belongings at will, and that one unfortunate but easily bearable price to pay is the occasional loss of our ability to prosecute an honest-to-goodness criminal.
So, too, in this debate there are honest and rational objections about the validity of requiring that people subsidize the cost of other people’s health care. That is not a question of costs; it’s a question of whether the proper role of government is to require that health care be made available to all, i the same way that roads or the military are provided for the benefit of all.
Of course, you may claim that it is certainly the proper role of government to do that. But you can hardly claim that this answer is unquestionably correct; you don’t have a Big Book of Government Roles that we all agree is the authority for defining the proper role of government.
So if debate were honest and rational, you would not be participating in it, at least with the claim you just made. There is obviously an honest and rational claim that health care is the proper role of the government, but there is ALSO an honest and rational claim that it is not.
Maybe if you guys thought you could do better, you should’ve presented an alternate plan… or done something about it during the 8 years you had a President on the payroll. Not surprisingly, Republicans didn’t do a damn thing, and are now blaming that failure to do anything on the Democrats.
It’s never a Republican’s fault, is it? You’re just pathetic.
Your pipeline to Fox is working perfectly. Obama is not a liberal. He is center right and has caved to the big money and insurance companies. For some weird reason. that should please you. But even that does not move you. This health bill will not do much of anything, the lobbyists have been successful in swiss cheesing it. They have tons of loopholes and gave insurance companies and Pharm a lot of time to rob us. That should make you quite happy.
You really should stop calling the health care bill “Obamacare.” It has long past ceased resembling anything Obama himself had proposed. It is Congress’s health care bill now, as you well know.
But I won’t argue that the Democrats in Congress are screwing it up big time. The Democratic Party has never had the kind of discipline and hegemony that the GOP has occasionally enjoyed.
Obama’s proposed budget has a deficit, but the last year of the Bush fiscal planning clearly put him behind the eightball. By now, it may be his economy, but it’s hardly reasonable to blame him for the current budget and “shattering records.”
I love how everyone loves to call “Godwin’s Law!” on anything stupid Republicans say but then they turn around and cry “But he has to be wrong on Issue X! He thinks Obama will take all our guns and force us to gay-marry!”
Are liberals so inept that they don’t see that it’s the same exact logical fallacy that tears the “You know who else loves pillows? Hitler!” arguments to shreds?
The only rational answer to this question is “Yes, it is.” Any other answer is ideological, not rational.
When you compare your current system of private insurance with government-run health insurance programs, it becomes clear that Americans pay twice as much per capita for a comparable standard of care, while leaving 15% of the population entirely uninsured a many more without adequate coverage.
Any objection to “subsidizing the other guy” is irrational because an intelligent system is bound to cost much, much less - even if coverage is extended to everyone.
This sort of willful ignorance/stupidity, in the face of sound reasoning is, in my opinion, the reason America is so screwed up. And the number one reason you have exactly the healthcare/lack thereof, which you deserve.
Your problems, it seems to me, are not really healthcare reform, the war on terror, lack of economic regulation, those are just symptoms. The real problem is actual, honest to God ignorance. Of a magnitude that is hard to fathom in a first world nation.
Maybe fix whatever it is that’s lacking in your education system so your population can think critically. Then Glen Beck won’t have an audience of half wits lapping up his stupidity. Who knows, maybe your other problems will start to resolve themselves too!
Perhaps instead of solely blaming the admin, better to lay the blame at the (Democratically controlled) congress, Bush’s last year, and Obama’s first, all together.
If you look at your article, it shows Bush’s last year was $450b in the hole, while Obama’s is (erp) $1.4 Trillion-with-a-T. Yikes. Who will pay that? Even after a few years, CBO is projecting Obama deficits between 6 and 800 b. That’s without healthcare adding $900b more (the last number I’ve seen). Plus… what? Cap and Trade, hammering the economy again? A second stimulus? Where does it ever stop?
How can anyone defend this? How can we saddle the next generation (and the next…) this way? Talk about a lack of personal responsibility.
Sure there are idiots in Canada, tons of them. But they don’t have the sway to tell gay people they can’t marry, join in the debacle that is Iraq or make a woman mortgage her home because she got breast cancer.
We do other stupid things like spend billions on the Olympics!
For $48 billion, I can gift the 12 million uninsured people in this country with $4,000 each.
For $480 billion, I can gift the 12 million uninsured people in this country with $40,000 each.
For $960 billion, I can gift the 12 million uninsured people in this country with $80,000 each.
Pick one of these numbers…which to you seems reasonable?
Why did the other numbers you didn’t pick seem unreasonable? One of them is terribly close to the cost of one of the bills that was proposed.
Which would you rather personally have? Insurance, or cash?
The claim has been made by some in government that much of the money will come from cost savings in Medicare. How? If this is true, PROVE IT TO ME. Just as in business, if you want me, as your employer, to believe that you are capable of handling a big job, be diligent in the LITTLE JOBS FIRST, then I’ll trust you with the big ones. SAVE THE MONEY IN MEDICARE FIRST, Congress…THEN talk to me about how you will manage the rest…
…and while you’re at it, institute meaningful tort reform, transparency of procedure and other costs between health institutions, national - rather than state-based - private insurance, eliminate the HMOs created by Ted Kennedy in the 1970s, and re-allow not-for-profit insurance companies.
PS Bricker great post. I wish more people would use logic and reasoning, instead of the emotionally charged venom that flies around this board so much.
To so many of the nitwits here, there is only one side of the issue, theirs. Whether it’s UHC, AGW, gay marriage, tax progressivity, nuclear disarmament, etc. If you are against gay marriage, for example, it’s not for any legit reasons, it’s because you must be afraid of ‘them’, ie a homophobe. Which then disqualifies you from the ‘intelligent’ side of the debate. Or you’re a Limbaugh or Beck devotee. Or a Republic-tard or citizen of dumbfuckistan etc.
I know it’s the pit, about the only interesting forum I think, but it’d be nice to see the emotion backed up with something resembling facts.
The only rational answer is to gut the Fourth Amendment, and put an end to more criminal activity thereby. But that “rational” answer fails to account for the intangible costs associated with living in a society where the government has unfettered pwer to search your home, and the intangible benefits of allowing a zone of privacy for individuals. But we as a society weigh those intangibles, and decide that the increased “cost” that the Fourth Amendment imposes on us is worth paying.
“Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute,” is, by your lights, also “irrational,” I imagine. That’s another calculus in which more than simply the dollars expended at the moment are considered.
So it’s not convincing to say, “Any objection to ‘subsidizing the other guy’ is irrational because an intelligent system is bound to cost much, much less…” when the objection is to forced subsidization of the other guy, regardless of cost. Someone may rationally say, in other words, that it’s not the cost, it’s the objection to being forced to pay for someone else, period.
It’d be a believable argument **if **you didn’t willingly pay for public education, police and fire services, the advantages to the larger society being obvious to anyone with brainmatter.
If you don’t want to pay for someone else move to Somalia. This right here is the central stupidity of the 21st century conservative. Not wanting to “pay for other people” isn’t a logical argument, it’s a self destructive and ignorant argument.
If you have a good job, you have it because of the security of the government and the socialized things like roads, communication infrastructure and utilities. You pay for other people, it’s how cities work. And the cost of health care reform is less than the cost of not reforming it and it provides better results for everyone.
Only ideologues and the uninformed are against HCR because they are “paying for other people”.