IT'S TIME FOR UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE

@plainoldme,

Nope, I mean what I said... Obamacare.

Repeal it and replace it.

@MASSAGAT,

MASSAGAT wrote:

I didn't know Bill Maher was a Health-Care Expert? I thought he was just a slimy left wing twerp. Try someone with credentials, plainoldme.

Maher is a very bright guy, who has been very accurate on political matters. Thus, the right will attack him with vigor.

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Bill Maher makes Biden look brilliant.

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@H2O MAN,

It's the same plan Massachusetts has, therefore, it is RomneyCare. That it is the same plan Mass has is a reason why liberals object to it. Guess you don't read the papers, eh?

1 Reply

@Advocate,

They didn't bother to read the piece which was funny, as much of Bill's commentary is. It is often through humor that one sees truth . . . but . . . considering some of the stuff righties post here, it is obvious that truth is the furthest thing from their minds.

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@plainoldme,

plainoldme wrote:

It's the same plan Massachusetts

Please compare the two and show us all how it's identical to the failed plan Mass has.

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@MASSAGAT,

MASSAGAT wrote:

I didn't know Bill Maher was a Health-Care Expert? I thought he was just a slimy left wing twerp. Try someone with credentials, plainoldme.

So it sounds like you're saying we shouldn't care what he thinks because he's not a "healthcare expert". Though, I doubt you are either. I doubt the lawmakers who wrote this bill are "healthcare experts" either. What sort of credentials make someone a healthcare expert anyway?

1 Reply

@sstainba,

What about people who have worked in Health Care for years, such as Directors of Hospitals and Clinics? What about people from Think Tanks like the Hoover Institute in California who have been thinking and writing about Healthcare for decades? What about lawyers who have been involved in very complex health cases since 1980? What about the heads of insuance companies like Kaiser and/or Blue Cross?

These people know far more about Health Care and how it can be delivered
adequately and efficiently.

Maher, in my view, is a moron. His views are a mile wide and two inches deep!

1 Reply

@H2O MAN,

Massachusetts Plan is a disaster with the HIGHEST PREMIUMS IN THE COUNTRY, h2O!

1 Reply

@Advocate,

Advocate wrote:

Maher is a very bright guy, who has been very accurate on political matters. Thus, the right will attack him with vigor.

Maher is about the dimmest bulb in the house.

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@MASSAGAT,

MASSAGAT wrote:

What about people who have worked in Health Care for years, such as Directors of Hospitals and Clinics? What about people from Think Tanks like the Hoover Institute in California who have been thinking and writing about Healthcare for decades? What about lawyers who have been involved in very complex health cases since 1980? What about the heads of insuance companies like Kaiser and/or Blue Cross?

Precisely.

And although not a health care expert, I have a brother that was a family physician all of his working life, retired now. Also a cousin a physician. Also nurses in the family. Plus a little common sense experience as a customer and user of health insurance plans all of my life, as a productive self supporting family with good insurance coverage, both via through my employer and later through my own health coverage. And friends of the family as doctors and nurses. Actually, health care is simple common sense, it works not much different than any other responsible industry, whereby free markets will most assuredly deliver the best health care in the world, and that is what America has done. That is not going to guarantee the longest lifespans as is so often errantly argued here by liberals, because Americans have one of the most coddled and unhealthy lifestyles in the world.

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@okie,

Quote:

Actually, health care is simple common sense, it works not much different than any other responsible industry, whereby free markets will most assuredly deliver the best health care in the world, and that is what America has done.

Yes, except for the fact that this is completely untrue. America doesn't have the best HC in the world by any stretch of the imagination.

Forget lifespan - just look at the cost per person, per year, to pay for that lower lifespan. It is much higher then many other countries.

Cycloptichorn

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@Cycloptichorn,

I know that Cyclops will not even try to rebut this because he does not want to get his shoes dirty but for the rest of you--Note

Can Obama avert a fiscal catastrophe?.

By Fred Hiatt
Monday, March 29, 2010

Last summer President Obama told me that once health reform became law, he could pivot to the "broader structural changes" needed to bring the federal deficit under control.

Without health reform, he said during a July telephone interview, there would be no hope for fiscal reform. With it, he would be in a position to "start laying out a broader picture about how we are going to handle entitlements in a serious way."

Well, it's been six days since he signed the bill, and he still hasn't saved Social Security.

Just kidding. We can give him another day or two.

But the long-term threat is no joke, as Obama has acknowledged many times. If Obama does not pivot, the country will be in serious trouble.

Why? According to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last week, Obama's budget plan has the government spending one-quarter of the national economy (25.2 percent of gross domestic product) 10 years from now, while collecting revenue that's less than one-fifth (19.6 percent).

Such a gap isn't sustainable for any country. The United States would have to borrow so much money that in interest alone the government would be spending 4.1 percent of GDP -- compared with 1.4 percent this year. Other programs -- for defense, for the poor, for national parks, for everything -- would be squeezed more and more. The United States would be increasingly at the mercy of China, Saudi Arabia and other lenders.

"I understand why a deficit hawk would be nervous," Obama told me last July. "I'm nervous about this. And if you talk to my senior advisers, they'll tell you I'm on them every day about how are we going to make sure that we're positioning ourselves to take care of this long term."

But if he's talking with his advisers, Obama hasn't begun to prepare Americans for what such positioning will take.

Here's one measure of the challenge: The president touts health reform in part because it will reduce the deficit -- according to the CBO, by $143 billion in the next 10 years.

That sounds pretty good, until you consider that Obama would need the equivalent of 70 additional health bills to undo the $9.8 trillion that his budgets will add to the deficit during the next 10 years, according to the CBO.

(Actually, it would take something like 220 health-care bills of deficit reduction, because the true savings from health care are more like $44 billion, once you subtract $70 billion in premiums that people will pay for long-term-care insurance and $29 billion they will pay into the Social Security trust fund, all of which will have to be paid out later. But either way, it's a frightening picture.).
****************************************************************
I really don't think that Cyclops would get excrement on his shoes by attempting to rebut Mr. Hiatt, but then I don't think he would be able to do so!

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This is interesting.
The new health insurance plan the govt just voted on gave the insurance industry a way out, and now the dems are upset that the insurance companies are taking advantage of it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/health/policy/29health.html

Quote:

WASHINGTON " Just days after President Obama signed the new health care law, insurance companies are already arguing that, at least for now, they do not have to provide one of the benefits that the president calls a centerpiece of the law: coverage for certain children with pre-existing conditions.
Mr. Obama, speaking at a health care rally in northern Virginia on March 19, said, “Starting this year, insurance companies will be banned forever from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions.”

The authors of the law say they meant to ban all forms of discrimination against children with pre-existing conditions like asthma, diabetes, birth defects, orthopedic problems, leukemia, cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease. The goal, they say, was to provide those youngsters with access to insurance and to a full range of benefits once they are in a health plan.

To insurance companies, the language of the law is not so clear.

Insurers agree that if they provide insurance for a child, they must cover pre-existing conditions. But, they say, the law does not require them to write insurance for the child and it does not guarantee the “availability of coverage” for all until 2014.

William G. Schiffbauer, a lawyer whose clients include employers and insurance companies, said: “The fine print differs from the larger political message. If a company sells insurance, it will have to cover pre-existing conditions for children covered by the policy. But it does not have to sell to somebody with a pre-existing condition. And the insurer could increase premiums to cover the additional cost.”

So the insurance companies are abiding by the letter of the law.

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@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Quote:
Actually, health care is simple common sense, it works not much different than any other responsible industry, whereby free markets will most assuredly deliver the best health care in the world, and that is what America has done.

Yes, except for the fact that this is completely untrue. America doesn't have the best HC in the world by any stretch of the imagination.

Forget lifespan - just look at the cost per person, per year, to pay for that lower lifespan. It is much higher then many other countries.

Cycloptichorn

Predictably, cyclops argues the exact errant argument that I said liberals errantly use, lifespans, which is as much or more tied to lifestyle as it is medical care. Since we live so well here, and are highly technological, we do not get enough exercise and we are one of the most obese and unhealthy diet populations in the world. And even with our lifestyle, obesity, and all of that, our lifespan is not much different than anywhere else. Another errant argument is cost, because after all, we also spend more on all kinds of things, not just medical care, because our incomes are higher, so why wouldn't we rate medical care as worthy of our expenditures?

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@H2O MAN,

You're a big boy and you have a computer. Do it yourself. Romney has been called down for his hypocrisy in criticizing Obama but Romney is a cheat and liar so what else is new?

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@okie,

Actually, there have been a couple of articles which explained WHY the MARKET DOES NOT WORK when it comes to health care.

1 Reply

@okie,

How can you say that when Cyc clearly wrote and clearly cut and pasted: Forget lifespans . . .

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@plainoldme,

plainoldme wrote:

Actually, there have been a couple of articles which explained WHY the MARKET DOES NOT WORK when it comes to health care.

Okay, what articles? I can find articles to say anything, but it means nothing if it has no valid evidence. Besides, the health care industry has already been corrupted and skewed by non-market forces, such as Medicare one huge one. I have in fact posted an article a while back which provided evidence that the advent of Medicare has already done very serious damage to the competitive and free market qualities of world class health care system prior to the institution of Medicare. Anytime you inject Central Planning into any industry, you basically inject very serious problems and unintended consequences, and you pollute the best economic system known to man, this is just basic Economics 101. Obamacare is destined to only add more unintended consequences to the existing mess that we have. The way to have fixed the problem would have been to tweak, adjust, and eliminate the factors that have caused us problems already, not multiply them. The Republicans have been proposing many of those correct solutions to fix the problems instead of creating new ones and complicating the system even more, but they have been largely ignored. Case in point, Medicare and Medicaid are a couple of the most corrupt, wasteful, and inefficient government programs in the history of the country, and Obamacare will follow in that legacy. I have to conclude that Obama and many Democrats are just dumb, and basically ignorant of economics and the health care industry specifically.

1 Reply

@okie,

Quote:

other errant argument is cost, because after all, we also spend more on all kinds of things, not just medical care, because our incomes are higher, so why wouldn't we rate medical care as worthy of our expenditures?

Uh, THAT isn't my argument. I don't know whose argument you are talking about.

Other countries get health care which is comparable or better then ours, and they do it for less cost per person then we do. I don't care about the lifespan thing - that's why I said 'forget it.'

Now, maybe the way those countries do things wouldn't necessarily work here; every place isn't the same, and I accept that idea. But we ought to be looking at what works in their system and figuring out how to make that work in our system. Reflexively yelling 'Socialist!' every time someone brings up a different way of doing things then the current way is a poor way of moving into the future.

Regarding obesity and health issues, I don't seem to recall Conservatives promoting any real ideas to deal with the underlying problem, and when Democrats try to, it's nothing but cries of 'anti-business!' from our side. What's it going to be?

We both know that dealing with both obesity and health care are necessary for our country to move forward into the future. How do any of your ideas deal with these problems?

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

IT'S TIME FOR UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE

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