Acting like a smug ball of shit is hardly a suitable alternative for a cite where these Marxists of yours are getting away with murder here.
Senior Beef:
Were this any other poster, of course you would be right. But we’re talking about Sam here. I know him of old.
You have to break down some of the items in Sam’s list to specifics in order to fully understand what I mean. For example, Sam can claim he believes government has a role in health care, but his actual position is for the government “to offer…catastrophic coverage only to fix the worst cases of people being bankrupted by health care bills.” In other words, government intervention in the health care system at such a limited level as to make a mockery of the concept, more draconian than even the previous system prior to UHC, and completely in line with conservative principles. Other than this one very limited case, Sam believes the entire system should be private, and he has consistently argued for privatization (and against the Canadian system), usually employing crooked arguments and dubious sources, for as long as I’ve known him. But as long as he can point to any situation in which he can perhaps grant the government a small role, he can twist all of this to claim he supports the idea of a “role” for the government in health care, as if that somehow makes him an enlightened free thinker and radically different from any other run-of-the-mill conservative you meet on the street.
Do you see how this works?
Wrong again, Uzi.
You claimed that leftists here claimed (or at least suggested) that Canada’s system was “the goal”. Here’s your quote:
[QUOTE=rightwing fucktard]
They said Canada as if that was the goal.
[/QUOTE]
The quote from EP that you cited does NOT say that. Here’s the cite you used to “prove” me wrong:
[QUOTE=EP]
If the “real” left had been in power and had crafted a health reform bill, you would be seeing a health insurance system similar to Canada.
[/QUOTE]
Now, as I hope you will note, saying that leftwingers would craft a health care system "similar to Canada"s is NOT, in any way, shape, or form, saying that Canada’s system is any kind of “goal”. EP mentioned Canada merely for purposes of quick comparison, and because it might be a model for a US system. A US domestic socialized medicine system would OBVIOUSLY be substantially different than Canada’s. No one here has expressed any desire at all to emulate Canada as a “goal”.
As I said before, this whole thing is just a bullshit straw man. You’re putting words in our mouths.
Ohmigod! This is fucking PRICELESS!
“I never said, ‘love it or leave it’! I said, ‘if you don’t like it, you can go somewhere else’!”
:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
Cite?
Actually, first define “conservative” and “liberal”. Then give me a cite.
Really? A comprehensive catastrophic health care insurance system given to every American is so little that it makes a mockery out of the idea of state intervention to fix health care markets? That says a lot more about where you’re coming from than it does about me. We can argue the merits of a catastrophic plan supplemented by gap insurance and medical savings accounts and other incentives vs a full UHC plan, but you don’t get to claim that one side is so far off the mark that their arguments are a ‘mockery’.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln - how did you like the play?
Yes, I do. I see that the argument keeps mutating and being stretched ever thinner in an attempt to make your whole accusation unfalsifiable.
You said I was a liar. You admitted you’ve never actually seen me lie. You accused me of being a far-right dogmatic conservative. I posted a laundry list of things I have changed my mind about or have been to the left of the Republicans and even most Democrats. You then began to nitpick each one to explain it away, then you finally collapse into basically saying, “He’s just so… soo… tricky.”
Want me to fetch your slippers for you too?
This of course is another conservative failing. Confusing a label for the thing.
Ask people how they label themselves, they avoid the conservative-stigmatized liberal label.
Ask them about their actual values and the programs they support, it comes out quite a bit differently.
I wouldn’t count these sorts of polls as too meaningful. The Republicans have done such a good job at making the word liberal into an epithet. I’ve seen lots of polls in which people are hesistant to self-identify as liberal or progressive, and yet if you run them down the progressive platform and ask what they agree with, it turns out that there are way more ideological liberals than people willing to label themselves that way.
Edit: Or what the guy who hit submit 1 minute earlier than me said.
:dubious: A cute way of dodging the fact that you’re not actually answering the more substantive part of Cyningablod’s question.
You linked to a brief and conservative-slanted (which explains the quoted title) description of a 2007 poll on how Americans self-identify in terms of political ideology. The poll had 21% of respondents describing themselves as either “somewhat liberal” or “very liberal” and 45% self-identifying as either “somewhat conservative” or “very conservative”.
However, those poll results tell us nothing about whether the respondents hold liberal or conservative positions on various actual issues. In other words, it doesn’t define those terms in any meaningful way.
Such self-identifications aren’t very robust, as you can see from these 2008 poll results where again, 22% of respondents self-identified in a “liberal” category but here only 32% claimed a “conservative” category. Did conservatives defect from their cause in droves from 2007 to 2008, or do the results just indicate that ideological self-identification can be more fluctuating than actual political positions?
For example, as this Pew survey notes,
None of those guys comes close to Limbaugh or Beck on the scale of extremist, crazy, dishonest or dumb. Trying to pretend that liberal “crazies” are truly “equivalents” of conservative crazies is disingenuous.
Or maybe, much as you may hate to consider the possibility, it’s because US liberals just aren’t as prone to that sort of extreme irrational hatred and alternative-reality scenarios as US conservatives currently are. (You may also be a bit biased in favor of considering someone like Glenn Beck more “personally likable” than someone like Michael Moore simply because Beck insults your political adversaries while Moore insults your political allies.)
I certainly recognize that we’ve got a lot of dumb and/or hostile and/or paranoid and/or irrational liberals out there. But AFAICT, in the current American political climate, liberals on average are just nowhere near as steeped in the crazy as conservatives on average are.
Sure, you can find some fringe whackos on the left who are just as loony as even the most rabid Tea-Party birther that you could scrape up on the right. But they have much less significance in terms of their numbers and their influence.
Sam:
You’re an idiot. I’ve not claimed that your argument for or against whatever cockamamie bullshit you’re promoting this time around is a “mockery.” I’m claiming that to use your support of said bullshit as an example of how different you are from an average conservative makes a “mockery of the concept” – that is to say, a mockery of the idea that the government should have a role to play in providing health care. Most sane people, when they make a statement like that, mean that the government should have a *greater role *than it has now; you actually mean the exact opposite. I know this a bit difficult for you to grok, but please do try to keep up, Sammy.
Yes. Because supporting the idea that the government should intervene only in the most extreme of circumstances under the rubric “I support a governmental role in health care” is exactly like your husband being shot while watching a play. You have nothing to come with but rhetoric, do you?
I posted an off-hand insult that I never expected you to fix your attention to (I should have known better). I then corrected it, immediately, in the same thread. (By contrast, it’s taken you *8 fucking years * to concede that you might have been a bit gullible during all that nastiness prior to the Iraq invasion.)
So, staying with our current example, is it your honest contention that your support for “a government role in health care”, as you conceive of it in practice, is actually to the left of Republicans and even most Democrats? If not, why did you include it in your list? Including a right wing talking point in a list extolling your left wing credentials seems a bit… well, misleading to me.
Oh. I see. Inspecting what you actually mean is nitpicking.
But you know what – I’ve wandered these swamps before. I’m not doing it again.
I will say that I’m kinda gobsmacked by your admission that you were a bit “gullible” prior to the Iraq invasion. Actually, you weren’t gullible, you were willfully ignorant, snide, hateful, and completely wrong, but okay. Gee whiz, the “gullibility” displayed by you and your fellow travellers sure has cost the US a lot in terms of blood and treasure, hasn’t it? Not to mention the incredible suffering inflicted on millions of Iraqis. Yet when you finally admit it, it’s like you’re admitting to having been wrong about some abstract point in a high school debate. I certainly don’t see it having led to any serious soul-searching or regret from your side. And as for your political convictions? They’re exactly the same, as far as I can see.
If it would be obviously substantially different than Canada’s then it would not be ‘similar’ to Canada’s. Why don’t you man up and admit that was what was said? If you want to change your mind, then admit you made the mistake and say so.
[QUOTE=Cyningablod]
“I never said, ‘love it or leave it’! I said, ‘if you don’t like it, you can go somewhere else’!”
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Uzi]
Apparently the US is not ‘left’ enough to have a system like Canada’s, so your only option at this point is to move.
[/QUOTE]
You left out this part. The reality is that the only way you are going to live with a health care system that you seem to want (whatever that is “But by god, it isn’t Canada’s”. It will just be similar to Canada’s only completely different) is by going somewhere where it currently exists. It ain’t going to happen in the US anytime soon. So sorry to burst your socialist dream bubble with reality. Hey, if you want to equate that with ‘Loving it and leaving it’, by all means go ahead. You could ‘Hate it or leave it’, too; a more likely scenario. Or you could just not ‘leave it’ and continue bitching about it with the associated stress ensuring you’ll have to use it sooner. Whatever floats your boat.
This is just insane. My kid dropped a piano stool on her toe a while back, around 8pm or so on a weekend, went down to the ER. We were seen by a triage nurse within 15 minutes, doctor for an xray within 30, checked, cleaned and bandaged and out of there within 90 minutes or so. The cost, including the emergency room fee, xrays, dressing, pain killer and all? I think around $160. All in. Total.
The delivery of our second kid, including prenatal, C-Section, 2 days in hospital? Around 10k…of which the gubermint paid about 50%, another 30% from our medical fund - so out of pocket we paid about $3k I think.
You guys really badly need to do SOMETHING about healthcare. I can remember seeing stats that the US spends a LOT more on healthcare than any other developed nation - by orders of magnitude.
$700 per month - that’s just crazy slap me bitch insane as a cost for health insurance. Tieing healthcare to the employer is crazy insane as well. All ideology aside, WHY in the ever loving fuck would you want to be changing insurers when you change jobs? That’s just pure fucked up crap.
Who funds it is a different question, but that you can be denied coverage for a pre-existing condition when you change jobs is just out and out wrong.
Oh…and by the way, the above costs are for Singapore, hardly the last bastion of the socialist state.
Elizabeth warren heads a consumer protection bureau that is getting involved in cleaning up the ways that credit card companies and banks fleece their customers. Sounds good . The Repubs are crafting a bill to defund her agency and all the “czars” Warren and her entire staff will not be allowed to draw a salary.
Who do the Repubs work for? It is clear, they will be on the side of the wealthy and powerful as they dream up new ways to screw people out of their money. They are a nasty little party that will do the bidding of the rich at the expense of the small people every time.
My god, I did indeed google that stupid bitch and…
“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.”
She’s proud that the US killed civilians? She’s advocating that this should be done?
And this woman is still employed? She still gets airtime?
My fucking arse that’s dumb.
I’m a New Zealander, the first country to give universal suffrage* - there, if she came out with something like this she would be unemployable, the entire politcal spectrum would be out for her blood.
Here in Singapore she would be arrested and thrown into prison for the next thirty years, never to be heard from again.
OK, fine, you’re the US and you’re “special”. Well, for just how special you can be, continue to give people like that airtime and see where the fuck it gets you.
You know it’s sad, I was having a chat with a colleague the other day. And both of us were commenting on how fucking unbelievably stupid a large chunk of America is. How damn moronic they are. Birtherism, Literal belief in creation, et al…it goes beyond dumb to criminal stupidity.
Sitting here, its literally defies belief that America can achieve so much.
Of course, reading the dope, it’s easy to see why stuff even happens at all. 
- Yeah, it’s debatable so sue me
It is completely insane. We lived in Australia for a few years (my husband is Australian) and the same kid, when he was a baby, had pre-asthmatic breathing issues. He had three hospitalizations before he was six months old - one overnight, one for five nights, and one for a week. Because he was RSV-, they did a bunch of tests to see if there were deeper issues going on. He had follow-ups with a specialized pediatrician. He received absolutely top-notch care. We paid ZERO dollars out of pocket for the whole thing. Our total cost? A 1% (of our income) Medicare levy paid with our yearly taxes…slightly more than what we pay for one month of our crappy American health insurance, that hardly covers anything. We are being robbed by the health insurance companies.
They are the same thieves that want to run Social Security. it is a huge pool. If they can filter 30 percent off that they would be rolling in more poor peoples dough. SS is an extremely well run organization that costs less than 2 percent for running it. The bankers and financiers have had their eyes on that money pot for a long time. They are able to convince the stupid conservatives that that is a good idea.
Our health care cost double what any other nation pays. For most, we have a much worse system. For some, they get none at all. But America is about taking care of the rich. They are doing well and have great health care. The best. Of course, the rest of us are paying for it.
I would love to pay $700/mo. The last quote I got was $1400/mo. I no longer have health insurance of any kind.
The last quote I got was $1350 a month, but with a $2,500 deductible before anything was covered, and that was for one person. $18,700 a year. But it didn’t matter, because I was turned down anyway because of my pre-existing conditions. I do qualify for the high risk pool created courtesy of the healthcare reform bill, but that coverage would cost about $850 a month with a $1,500 deductible and I can’t really afford $11,700 a year, either.
Bullshit. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, you fuckwit.
You, for example, as a human, are “substantially different” from a pygmy chimpanzee. Yet you are also “similar” in many ways. (In more ways than most humans are similar to pygmy chimpanzees, I might add.)
Umm…because it wasn’t.
By the way, YOU’RE the one who started out this whole straw man thing by saying that we upheld Canada’s HC system as a “Utopia”. When I called you on that, you shifted the goalposts and instead accused us of merely upholding it as a “goal”. The one who’s being intellectually dishonest here is YOU.
(emphasis mine)
Another straw man. That’s not remotely what I said. Putting words in my mouth again. I. NEVER. SAID. “COMPLETELY”. Asshat.
I’m done here. You’re not worth my time, because you’re either too fucking stupid or too fucking dishonest to recognize your own many rhetorical fallacies.