IT'S TIME FOR UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE

Thank you Francois. It was a typo. It is one I often make but usually I spot it and make the correction. I was probably holding the rest of the sentence in my head and couldn't risk the break in concentration and flow.

I hope my mistake didn't spoil your enjoyment of it.

Not at all, Spendi, I enjoyed the clarity and the evocativeness of the whole paragraph..

There is 80 % agreement on HC reform.


Scaling The Summit

During yesterday's seven-and-a-half hour bipartisan health care reform summit, President Obama urged Republicans to abandon their obstructionist tactics and work with Democrats to pass comprehensive reform. Obama highlighted areas of bipartisan agreement in his health care proposal and suggested that Democrats would move forward with or without Republican support. "I will tell you this, that when I talk to the parents of children who don't have health care because they've got diabetes or they've got some chronic heart disease; when I talk to small business people who are laying people off because they just got their insurance premium, they don't want us to wait. They can't afford another five decades," Obama said. And while it's unclear whether the forum moved the debate forward, it provided Obama with an opportunity to engage "in a spirited and detailed policy debate with Republicans about one of the most compelling and ideologically polarizing issues facing the nation." The New York Times observed that "Mr. Obama's mastery of the intricacies of health policy was impressive even to some Republicans." "It was sort of his classroom," Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said. "I was glad we did it, because the president's megaphone is the biggest one and when he shares it with Republicans like he did, that gives us several hours to make our case, and I thought we made it well.'"

AREAS OF AGREEMENT: Throughout the summer, Republicans claimed that they agreed with 80 percent of the Democrats' bill. In September 2009, for instance, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) told a town hall meeting that "Republicans and Democrats agree on 80 percent of fixing the nation's healthcare system." Rep.Charles Boustany (R-LA), who delivered the Republican response to the President's congressional address in September, also said, "I would venture to say that we agree on about 80% of the issues right now. It's just a matter of hashing out those few areas where we disagree, but there's really not been that kind of real discussion, and it needs to happen." Yesterday, Democrats and Republicans held "a real discussion" and, at the President's urging, laid out many areas of agreement. Obama stressed that both agree on the need for more regulation of insurers, creating larger risk pools to help small businesses purchase cheaper coverage, establishing some insurance regulations and tackling malpractice reform. In fact, Obama's health care bill already includes many Republican proposals. The bill expands state-based high risk pools, creates a high deductible policy option for younger Americ ans, allows insurers to sell policies across state lines, gives states greater flexibility to undertake a number of reforms to improve the quality of how care is delivered, allows young adults to stay on their parents' health insurance policies for longer, eliminates a lot of the waste and abuse from current health care system and reduces medical errors. "And finally, with respect to bending the cost curve, we actually have a lot of agreement here. This is an area where if I sat down with Tom Coburn, I suspect we could agree on 95 percent of the things that have to be done," he added. Obama even suggested that he may embrace some Republican tort reform proposals. "[T]here are some examples of [malpractice reform] legislation that I actually would be interested in pursuing. Tom Coburn, [John McCain] and Richard Burr have talked about incentivizing and allowing states to experiment much more vigorously with ways to reduce frivolous lawsuits, to pursue settlements, to reduce defensive medicine. That's something I'd like to see if we could potentially get going."

AREAS OF DISAGREEMENT: Despite the many areas of bipartisan consensus and Republicans' past support for comprehensive Democratic policies such as the individual health insurance mandate, Republicans continued to argue that Democrats should abandon the existing health care legislation and incremental approach to reform. "We believe we have a better idea. And that's to take many of the examples that you just mentioned about health care costs, make that our goal, reducing health care costs, and start over, and let's go step by step toward that goal," said Alexander, who delivered the opening statement. "[W]e have to start by taking the current bill and putting it on the shelf and starting from a clean sheet of paper." Republicans argued that Congress should extend coverage to only three million Americans and said that re-engineering the insurance market and providing subsidies requires too much government and too much money. The best Republicans could offer was 'high-risk pools," and they portrayed minimum standards for insurance -- which they supported in 1993 -- as a government takeover. Americans should move into catastrophic health insurance policies, they claimed, with higher deductibles and smaller benefits. During one exchange, Obama asked Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), "Would you be satisfied if every member of Congress just had catastrophic care -- you think we'd be better health care purchasers? "I mean, is that a change you think we should make?" "I think actually we would," Barrasso responded. "We'd really focus on it. We'd have more, as you say, skin in the game. And especially if they had a savings account -- a health savings account -- they could put their money into that, and they'd be spending the money out of that." Obama's response was penetrating: "Would you feel the same way if you were making $40,000? Or if that was your income. Because that's the reality for a lot of folks."

MOVING FORWARD WITH REFORM: Obama closed the summit by suggesting that, without greater Republican cooperation, Democrats would have to move reform alone. "We cannot have another year-long debate about this. So the question that I'm going to ask myself and I ask of all of you is, is there enough serious effort that in a month's time or a few weeks' time or six weeks' time we could actually resolve something?" Obama asked. "f we can't close that gap, then I suspect Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner are going to have a lot of arguments about procedures in Congress about moving forward." The president also dismissed the Republicans' incrimentalist approach to reform. "The reason we didn't do it is because it turns out that baby steps don't get you to the place where people need to go. They need help right now. And so a step-by-step approach sounds good in theory, but the problem is, for example, we can't solve the preexisting problem if we don't do something about coverage." Republicans continued to insist that Democrats start over on reform. "The core problem is this: we don't think a 2,700 page bill...is a good idea," Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) said after the summit. "I was discouraged by the outcome," Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) added. "I do not believe there will be any Republican support for this 2,700 page bill." Still, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) sounded optimistic. "I still believe that we can work together and am hopeful that we reach the bipartisan solution to health reform that we’ve always preferred. We are serious about delivering meaningful health reform to the American people, and all options remain on the table to accomplish that," he said.

-- americanprogressaction.org

I watched the debate for 3 hours Ad. and it went nowhere as far as I could tell.

A load of generalisations. Like this bullshit--



What if they could not potentially get it going?


The President even admitted that he had taken out the basic legal minimum motor vehicle insurance, the cheapest, when he was a young man, and then rang the insurance company after he had a shunt. They laughed at him, he said, as well they might. It says it all really.

And he didn't miss a plug for the "First Lady" for the sterling work she is doing keeping herself in the public eye by hugging selected and disinfected children.

Did you get the jest about the top shelf books needing dusting?

I don't know, Spendi, but when I talked about evocativeness, at least three levels of suggested images arose from your comment.

The first one was this:



I'll tell about the others, if you are interested.

(For those thinking that my comments are off topic, mind the above is health care for me..)

It is most certainly more on topic than what that bunch of grandstanders were talking about in Washington which was enough to make anybody reach for the sick bag. They were talking about money and elections. One might even say that it is impossible for them to have talked about health.

What would Francois Rabelais have said about them? Or Freud. Or Reich.

Go on then--what where the other two?

Rabelais would have laughed at them, with that uproarious laughter of him.

For the others, is it worth to talk about?

As for the following levels of suggested images:



And finally, I can imagine a bunch of brats lurking at those books, especially to the pictures on them...

Librarians keep them out of reach, thus the dust...

My idea of a maid is not at all like that one Francois. No philosopher worth his salt, ---that's not a dust joke--it's a salt joke--, would seek to corrupt such sweet innocence and naivety. It would too easy. A couple of boiled sweets and some vague chit-chat about a research project in Morocco should suffice I think. A dig. In a recently unearthed temple complex dedicated to Isis.

And you can't afford to pay maids very much these days what with the credit crunch and us all having to tighten our belts and prepare for a bumpy landing. That's not a bumpy landing joke. Or it wasn't when I wrote it.

One wants experience. Which hasn't worked out so good. Well preserved 40 something who keeps up appearances and can talk about Coronation Street and the tabloid scuttlebuck more expertly than most experts can talk about their hobby horse; an allusion to Tristram Shandy. What's the sense of having conversations with people who know all the same things you do or who don't know anything: like the one in your picture doesn't look like she does. (The full colon there, if you will pardon the pun which is, unfortunately, ineluctable in a sentence such as this, is intended to cause the reader to pause. I think a lot of poor reading is caused by not paying attention to the punctuation and thus missing the flow of the author's thought.)

Many is the time I have gone in search of the maid in order to find out a name or what had happened in some story which I have seen on the News. Such stories are useful to weave in and out of discussions on more abstract matters and especially when they are matters which illustrate or throw light upon some aspect of the science which other participants in the discussion are reluctant to discuss. They not only provide an objective measure of things but they add a little colour and I daresay they are of some interest to those interested in them.

She also needs to be good with the pots and pans in the kitchen. There's not that much dust on the books on the top shelves. And remembering those important things which philosophers are apt to forget. Like where they put their spectacles or that there's egg drying on their tie.

I think your previous picture of what a well-dressed maid should look like frightens me a little. I would be concerned about her getting the upper hand and leading me into the narrow lanes and the untrodden paths where the swift don't win the race. (That's a bit of Dylan--I'm no match for that.)

There was a wonderful maid in Doctor Finlay's Casebook played by Barbara Mullen.

Per Gallup today:



If Obama's plans for Health Care have alienated so many in the country, as our Republican brethren here constantly state, why is he so much more trusted to do the right thing then his Republican opponents in Congress?

Cycloptichorn

51% of the country don't trust him. That's significant. The fact that they trust republicans even less doesn't mean anythin, since repubs aren't writing the bill. Also, as you know, the democrats in congress write the bill. They are trusted much less than Obama.

Mmm. I think that having 50% approval on an issue is a sign that you are doing things mostly right. Obama has definitely lost 5-10% from the fact that the WH has mis-managed the process so far, but not because the underlying ideas are bad.

Cycloptichorn

No, it doesn't mean 51 % don't trust him. 2% are unsure. It's 49-49.

Sorry, I'm on my phone and couldn't get close enough to see the undecided.

Still half the country is a statistically significant number. Especially since HC reform will impact 100% of us.

If Obama's ideas (whatever they really are) for health care are so admired in the country; and the Democrat Congress so trusted, relative to those nasty Republicans, - then why after more than a year is the effort stalled, and the prospect for it so uncertain?

I think the answer to your question is the same as why people trust the Republicans less on this matter.

T
K
O

That makes no sense. Please explain.

Coburn is delusional if he thinks that tort reform will lower HC costs. First, liability insurance is a small fraction of practice costs. Second, insurance companies are not about to lower prices in the event of tort reform.

States are free to impose tort reform, but don't do it. Why should citizens be second-rate citizens regarding the right to sue for negligence?

What I mean is that the stall on HCR is largely due to the obfuscation and circus created by the GOP. The reason why the GOP is trusted less is because of this kind of thing. They are related.

T
K
O

Rubbish TK. The GOP represents a certain opinion. It is that opinion which requires the GOP to obfucticate in a 3 ring circus.

That's what politicians do. They don't care what the opinion is. The GOP would represent using the over 60s in meat pies if it got them elected.