IT'S TIME FOR UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE

To a degree, the republicans have this one right - except they're not there to talk about how to manage cost, but to defeat health care reform.

Quote:

Republicans ask U.S. Senate to slow down on healthcare
By John Whitesides and Donna Smith John Whitesides And Donna Smith 58 mins ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) " The Senate Finance Committee made unsteady progress on Wednesday on a broad healthcare overhaul bill, working slowly through a crush of amendments as lawmakers battled over its cost and size.

Lawmakers resumed debate on Chairman Max Baucus's healthcare reform proposal, with Republicans repeatedly demanding more information on costs and calling for the committee to slow down its deliberations.

Why are they right to slow the process down, CI? They've been working on this bill for 9 months!

Cycloptichorn

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Why are they right to slow the process down, CI? They've been working on this bill for 9 months!

Cycloptichorn

Why blame this on Republicans?

In those nine months the Democrat Congress has produced at least three principal variants, none of which lived up to Obama's key campaign promises. Moreover, on issues ranging from cost to deficit impact to the impact on private care options, particularly the very generous plans enjoyed by their organized labor patrons, they have had to repeatedly reverse course and back away from previous assertions.

Finally the fact is that the drafting of the various bills was done by various Democrat interest groups and Committee staffs with very little participation allowed for Republicans.

In addition it appears that Democrat leaders in the Congress intend to minimize any debate or examination of the bill by either the whole House or Senate.

shrugs. You appear to identify yourself with thos currently in power to a rather ... odd degree. A real domineering bully on the keyboard. But do you really pack the gear?

Nearly nothing else has been discussed on the national political level for months. The 'debate' you refer to has already happened and you are merely grasping for straws at this point.

I've been trying to discuss the bill(s) in Congress; what I keep hearing is "what bill?, nothing has been finalized yet, it's still in committee". It's been quite annoying.

Wednesday's bill release follows months of negotiations among Baucus and five other Finance Committee senators dubbed the "Gang of Six" " Republicans Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Mike Enzi of Wyoming and Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Democrats Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico.

I will say that it's far easier to establish an efficient health care system when you're not the size of the US. It would probably be easier to do it on a state by state basis, or piggy back it onto an existing system like medicare, than it would be to establish something new from scratch at the federal level.

I'm not really sure why our size is all that prohibitive; what are the problems that are involved, when you scale the program up to cover our population? I hear this said a lot but never hear the specifics.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

I'm not really sure why our size is all that prohibitive; what are the problems that are involved, when you scale the program up to cover our population? I hear this said a lot but never hear the specifics.

That all depends on the solution and its scalability. Scaling implies that you first have something working a small subset, and then you expand it to a much greater set. We're starting with the whole enchilada. That's why I say it would be easier to do it on the state level or to piggy back it onto something that's already in place.

But I can think of plenty of issues that could arise ranging from availability of care to non-uniform costs -- health care costs are not the same everywhere in the US. And then there's the regional politics involved.

FreeDuck, You're right; the present plans being planned by congress doesn't address anything about cost differences and how the universal plan will accommodate them. I worry that one plan for the country will be inefficient and costly. I'd like to see trials done at different locations where cost differences are obvious to see how the universal plan should be patterned to meet those difference cost bases. I have more questions than the present plans offer, and I worry that without adjusting for different variables from location to location, the overall program will have too many inefficiencies and cost overruns.

They've been working for nine months, but we're still not sure how much this plan is going to cost and how it will add to the national debt; without this information, they need to go back to the drawing board and make some presumptions of cost and savings.

Most Americans believe the health plans now being developed by congress doesn't address the impact of increasing national debt, and fear for our economic future.