Thanks Spoons: It’s nice to get a perspective from the chronologically challenged.
(I kid, I kid!)
So, you fucked it up because we didn’t do anything?
Like I said, Democrats in control of both houses of Congress and the White House - and you can’t bring it off.
And you call me pathetic? If it makes you feel better.
So? Obama made health care reform his priority, instead of global warming or the deficit or unemployment or Iraq or Gitmo or anything else. His party controls Congress, and is working (at his behest) to come up with a bill. It’s Obamacare just as much as the Bush tax cuts were the Bush tax cuts.
If they did say that, they were lying.
Much of the problem - anyone who thinks that taxpayer funded health care isn’t free isn’t being “rational”.
Regards,
Shodan
You think I like being the smartest guy here? You think I enjoy that?
Can’t? It’s already through the House, and with a comfortable reconciliation margin in the Senate. Any slowness is an attempt to include Republicans who can say nothing more than No.
A mighty long list of problems your party left him, isn’t it? No wonder We the People voted you out on your asses. What makes you think any of your criticism of his attempts to clean up your messes has any credibility?
You know damn well what I meant. Now quit trolling.
But why? is it because there’s less lawyers or better tort system in Canada? Do they dictate the salary of healthcare workers? Do they do a cheaper (ie, less quality) job?
The point I’m making, is that it’s not a one-to-one comparison. If UHC were free and just as high quality as the care we (no, I) get now, then who wouldn’t be for it? The big fear is that the costs will skyrocket (as Medicare’s did after it was first implemented), to be paid for by our kids’ generation, mostly to the Chinese I’d suspect. Also that quality will fall off (Government anything is almost always worse than private sector, in terms of quality. Go ask people who live on base). Finally I worry about the impact of politics when it comes to making decisions about healthcare, much as politics crept into the decisions about the Stim bill and the near-takeover of both Chrysler and GM.
So I guess I’m saying, you can either ration healthcare by price, or by Gov fiat, pick one.
One thing they do is let their government health-care system *negotiate *with Big Pharma for drug prices. The Republicans’ Medicare bill from the last administration actually forbids it! And that’s the party that claims to be for free-market economics!
Yep, the rich and the retarded, that about covers it.
I notice you aren’t smart enough to combat what I said with anything but mealy mouthed bullshit you were fed by right wing ideologues. You appear to be unable to think for yourself.
The slippery slope is a fantasy. Twenty years from now they could institute Government-run healthcare without anything being done today. It depends on the congress we’ve got at that time. As for the cost, it saves us money silly billy. Try to keep informed.
They are largely lies spread by people with a monetary interest in the way things are to convince stupid, gullible sheep like you that HCR is teh ebils. Show me numbers of how many people travel here for necessary medical care. Necessary, mind you. I bet you’d find that the vast majority are rich people who don’t want to wait for non-life-threatening procedures. That would still be available if HCR happened, why wouldn’t it?
If you were informed you would know that wasn’t true to any great extent. We get slightly faster care in America. We also ignore 1/6th of the population. Do you think wait times in Canada would be better if they ignored 1/6th of their population?
Yes, you hear them from the right-wing echo chamber. Look up global warming, ACORN or any number of topics central to right dogma. You will find hundreds or thousands of blogs repeating the same story again and again giving the illusion of consensus. You’ve been played.
So, it’s not debating. It’s silly mockery. It doesn’t lead to any insights or conclusions. You’re intelligent enough to hold yourself to a higher standard. Why not try to be a constructive participant in the debate?
Not true. Shodan is stupid and remains willfully ignorant of the issues he argues for.
For instance he doesn’t understand basic economics but he can’t help flapping is ignorant mouth about it.
Shodan can frame a good argument when he wants to. I wish he would do better here though, because I am really open to all sides on this issue. There is good and bad with everything. I am about as center as they get, but I can’t find anyone on the right that is really doing a decent job arguing against HCR or telling me something useful they would do instead. Tort reform isn’t going to do anything about pre-existing or price increases.
My insurance has gone up 43 times since July 2006. Yeah, 43 times. And I work for The State of Texas.
An apt statement regarding most conservatives who come at it without studying the issues in depth. The players are the conservatives who do but cynically define a world that suits their needs and desires rather than reality to gain power from the played.
Salaries of Nurses and other support workers are not dictated directly by government, but are rather negotiated between health authorities or hospitals and unions. Most doctors are private corporations (they run their own business) and so are not on “salary”, but procedures are compensated by the Provincial insurance system on a published scale. Doctors (especially specialists) typically do make less than they would in the United States. They seem to be able to get by though, even though their income has not gone up as fast as it has in the US.
There may indeed be more control over frivolous lawsuits in Canada, however this does not impact the total healthcare budget as much as you seem to think.
In my cite, you will have noted that the rate of complications and death were similar, so I don’t think they did a job of “less quality”.
The real reason for the fact that Canada’s system is so much cheaper, despite managing to insure every single person, is in the cite I gave earlier in this thread:
I would have an easier time taking HCR proponents more seriously if they did a few things:
a) address tort reform. The largest contributor to the Democratic party is the Trial Lawyer assocation (ok, now it’s called soemthing else but I’m too lazy to Google it)
b) address the fraud and waste that supposedly exists within the Medicare/Medicaid system NOW. Not claim it will be tapped later to fund much of these shenanigans.
c) do some steps that the commies (er, I mean progressives) on this board should love - take care of pre-existing conditions, allow for negotiation w/big pharma, and fund medical school if people sign up to go to poor Appallachia, injun tribes, eskimos, etc., increasing the supply therefore reducing the cost
d) it’d be far better if the feds let the states run the show, mostly. any time there’s an option between fed bureaucracy and states, let the states do it
e) tell us how it will be paid for. Be specific.
f) address the law of unintended consequences. For example, from today’s WSJ:
Who will make up this difference? This is especially a big deal if that cocksucker Harry Reid’s plan of Medicare buy-in happens.
So Lobohan, instead of just throwing stones and insulting someone who challenges your lefty dogma, why not take a shot at addressing those issues?
For the record, they were active duty, not VA. They had conditions that prevented them from deploying, but not bad enough for emergency. They had to lay around on light duty for months.
I won’t argue about whether he understands economics or not, but he is clearly not stupid. I think he is capable of adding quite a lot to these debates, but unfortunately he enjoys his vapid partisan sniping a bit too much.
Tort reform is a fucking fantasy. It will save less than six billion dollars a year. You are being lied to because it is a simple drumbeat that the ignorant can dance to. Cite. Note that this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, but were it to happen, the exact level would be very important to get just right. It’s pretty far from the panacea that the right pretends it is.
The are addressing them now. That’s what the bill is for. Again, you appear to be utterly uninformed.
They are taking care of pre-existing conditions and as I recall there are some provisions for increasing the supply of general practice doctors.
Again, you show a woeful misunderstanding of the issues. By leveraging economies of scale and a huge risk pool we can do far better on a national basis than a state by state level.
You are randomly not believing the non-partisan CBO because some paid liar like Glen Beck told you to? Look into it, you’ve been utterly lied to on every point.
Ah, here is an actual real honest to god issue. You see, that is a reasonable thing to ask. The other stuff is just smokescreen lies you’ve internalized because you’re unwilling or unable to think for yourself. In answer to your question, the bottom lines for hospitals will likely fall to some extent. But, in the long run they will be better off because of the change of the incentives from being paid per procedure or test to being aimed at better outcomes (hospital re-admissions, secondary infections and so on).
Shut your whore mouth and think for once, kay?
Well he’s clever in his way. I doubt he’s won any awards for clear and insightful thinking however. Shodan’s charismatic and glib, but someone who stands so defiantly for an ideology and can’t be bothered to educate himself about it doesn’t, to me, seem very intelligent.
Then it’s OK
Left/right is very subjective, depending very much on the viewpoint of the observer.
I’m a Brit that now lives in Sweden. All Americans are right wing as far as I am concerned, just some less so than others.