IT'S TIME FOR UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE

Please read the words "the potential to earn up to and well over $600/hour".

Why all the erroneous conclusions that follow this statement?

parados said it best; some lawyers have the potential, but the average is not even close to that.

I also had the "potential" to earn $600/hour when I worked in consulting, and did just that, but it was not even close to the hourly rate of income based on my income tax returns.

Some of those Boston lawyers might be earning in excess of $1.2 million/year, but they are in a very small minority of all lawyers - percentage-wise. Bet. We have three lawyers in our family; my brother, my nephew, and my wife's cousin. They never made $600/hour.

Yes, there are some Bostonians who do.

While you may have been on the "table" for 6 hours for the heart procedure, many hours, days, etc were needed by the staff + surgeon to plan for your operation and subsequent care. The $10,000 bill was submitted to the surgeon for his/her total involvement in the case, not just his/her presence in the OR.

i won't say that there's no merit to your complaints, but you really sound like you believe that everybody outside of the medical profession is getting free money. trust me, 'tain't true.

in fact a lot of people have to bust their ass learning stuff they could care less about just to get or keep a job in which they have absolutely no hope of earning anything close to a low payed doctor of any discipline.

just an idea, but with all the bitterness you seem to have about this, you might want to consider another profession.

like say, musician. takes a natural ability, hour upon hour of practice just to get good enough to get in a band, pay for gear, rehearsals, transportation, promotion, clothes, and expendibles. just so you can be bohica'd by club owners who think thir being magnaminous if they toss ya a couple of drink tickets.

you do this until a manager and agent get hold of you, work you like a dog through every sh*thole they can find, deduct their percentage and expenses. and then wish you bon appetite over your "balogne on palm" feast.

but you do it because at the end of the yellow brick road is a -TADAH!- record contract. if you're lucky, it might even get released so you have half a chance of paying all of the recoupables that the cigar chompers are gonna take back out of your measely percentage and flats.

you do all of this because not only do you love music, it makes you feel good to provide something that most people also really like a lot.

and they like it even better when they download it for free off of p to p sites and torrent sites.

see where i'm goin' with this ?

btw, i forgot to mention this part;

there were no "many hours and days" spent planning for "my surgery".

i went directly from the table where a cardio guy did an angiogram to the prep-room to the surgery table. x4 blockages, the cleanest being 94% clogged.

but like i said, best money i ever spent.

Edwards has forced some of the other candidates to flesh out their healthcare proposals. Most of these proposals are seriously lacking.


^6/4/07: Obama in Second Place

By PAUL KRUGMAN

One of the lessons journalists should have learned from the 2000
election campaign is that what a candidate says about policy isn't just
a guide to his or her thinking about a specific issue -- it's the best
way to get a true sense of the candidate's character.

Do you remember all the up-close-and-personals about George W. Bush, and
what a likeable guy he was? Well, reporters would have had a much better
fix on who he was and how he would govern if they had ignored all that,
and focused on the raw dishonesty and irresponsibility of his policy
proposals.

That's why I'm not interested in what sports the candidates play or
speculation about their marriages. I want to hear about their health
care plans -- not just for the substance, but to get a sense of what kind
of president each would be. Would they hesitate and triangulate, or
would they push hard for real change?

Now, back in February John Edwards put his rivals for the Democratic
nomination on the spot, by coming out with a full-fledged plan to cover
all the uninsured. Suddenly, vague expressions of support for universal
health care weren't enough: candidates were under pressure to present
their own specific plans.

And the question was whether those plans would be as bold and
comprehensive as the Edwards proposal.

Four months have passed since then. So far, all Hillary Clinton has
released are proposals to help reduce health care costs. It's worthy
stuff, but it's hard to avoid the sense that she's putting off dealing
with the hard part. The real test is how she proposes to cover the
uninsured.

But last week Barack Obama, after getting considerable grief for having
failed to offer policy specifics, finally delivered a comprehensive
health care plan. So how is it?

First, the good news. The Obama plan is smart and serious, put together
by people who know what they're doing.

It also passes one basic test of courage. You can't be serious about
health care without proposing an injection of federal funds to help
lower-income families pay for insurance, and that means advocating some
kind of tax increase. Well, Mr. Obama is now on record calling for a
partial rollback of the Bush tax cuts.

Also, in the Obama plan, insurance companies won't be allowed to deny
people coverage or charge them higher premiums based on their medical
history. Again, points for toughness.

Best of all, the Obama plan contains the same feature that makes the
Edwards plan superior to, say, the Schwarzenegger proposal in
California: it lets people choose between private plans and buying into
a Medicare-type plan offered by the government.

Since Medicare has much lower overhead costs than private insurers, this
competition would force the insurance industry to cut costs -- making our
health-care system more efficient. And if private insurers couldn't or
wouldn't cut costs enough, the system would evolve into Medicare for
all, which is actually the best solution.

So there's a lot to commend the Obama plan. In fact, it would have been
considered daring if it had been announced last year.

Now for the bad news. Although Mr. Obama says he has a plan for
universal health care, he actually doesn't -- a point Mr. Edwards made in
last night's debate. The Obama plan doesn't mandate insurance for
adults. So some people would take their chances -- and then end up
receiving treatment at other people's expense when they ended up in
emergency rooms. In that regard it's actually weaker than the
Schwarzenegger plan.

I asked David Cutler, a Harvard economist who helped put together the
Obama plan, about this omission. His answer was that Mr. Obama is
reluctant to impose a mandate that might not be enforceable, and that he
hopes -- based, to be fair, on some estimates by Mr. Cutler and others --
that a combination of subsidies and outreach can get all but a tiny
fraction of the population insured without a mandate. Call it the
timidity of hope.

On the whole, the Obama plan is better than I feared but not as
comprehensive as I would have liked. It doesn't quell my worries that
Mr. Obama's dislike of "bitter and partisan" politics makes him too
cautious. But at least he's come out with a plan.

Senator Clinton, we're waiting to hear from you.
--------------------------------------------------------------

why not have universal AND private healthcare?

would it be so hard to sign up for the universal healthcare and if you didnt want it, to simply not sign up? Im sure the people who have no chance in hell of paying for medical care would appreciate the chance.
but on the other hand im sure they can suffer patiently too

Could you elaborate. I am not sure that I understand your post.

Hillary is not to be trusted on healthcare.


^6/8/07: Lies, Sighs and Politics

By PAUL KRUGMAN

In Tuesday's Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely
misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly
claimed that it was Ronald Reagan's birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the "gaffe of the
night?"

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the
bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the
White House haven't changed a bit.

You may not remember the presidential debate of Oct. 3, 2000, or how it
was covered, but you should. It was one of the worst moments in an
election marked by news media failure as serious, in its way, as the
later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.

Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading
statements, including some outright lies -- for example, when he declared
of his tax cut that "the vast majority of the help goes to the people at
the bottom end of the economic ladder." That should have told us, right
then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.

But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts
chose to critique the candidates' acting skills. Al Gore was declared
the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes -- failing to conceal his
justified disgust at Mr. Bush's dishonesty. And that's how Mr. Bush got
within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency.

Now fast forward to last Tuesday. Asked whether we should have invaded
Iraq, Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam
"had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they'd come in
and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction." He
dismissed this as an "unreasonable hypothetical."

Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans
Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush
ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney's remark should
have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday's debate. But
it wasn't.

There wasn't anything comparable to Mr. Romney's rewritten history in
the Democratic debate two days earlier, which was altogether on a higher
plane. Still, someone should have called Hillary Clinton on her
declaration that on health care, "we're all talking pretty much about
the same things." While the other two leading candidates have come out
with plans for universal (John Edwards) or near-universal (Barack Obama)
health coverage, Mrs. Clinton has so far evaded the issue. But again,
this went unmentioned in most reports.

By the way, one reason I want health care specifics from Mrs. Clinton is
that she's received large contributions from the pharmaceutical and
insurance industries. Will that deter her from taking those industries on?

Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news
organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate
analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism:
assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they "came across."

Thus most analysts declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in her debate,
because she did the best job of delivering sound bites -- including her
Bush-talking-point declaration that we're safer now than we were on
9/11, a claim her advisers later tried to explain away as not meaning
what it seemed to mean.

Similarly, many analysts gave the G.O.P. debate to Rudy Giuliani not
because he made sense -- he didn't -- but because he sounded tough saying
things like, "It's unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in
charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror." (Why?)

Look, debates involving 10 people are, inevitably, short on extended
discussion. But news organizations should fight the shallowness of the
format by providing the facts -- not embrace it by reporting on a
presidential race as if it were a high-school popularity contest.

For if there's one thing I hope we've learned from the calamity of the
last six and a half years, it's that it matters who becomes president --
and that listening to what candidates say about substantive issues
offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial
character judgments. Mr. Bush's tax lies, not his surface amiability,
were the true guide to how he would govern.

And I don't know if this country can survive another four years of
Bush-quality leadership.
------------------------------------------------------------------

Copied from above article: Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies -- for example, when he declared of his tax cut that "the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder." That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.

If that was the only one Bush misleading statement, I could forgive him, but the list is too long to ignore his lies and misrepresentations. How conservatives can continue to support a liar and dangerous president is beyond logic or common sense.

Examples found on the web:
1. Bush: "We went into Russia, we said, 'Here's some IMF money,' and it ended up in Viktor Chernomyrdin's pocket and others."

Fact: "Bush appears to have tangled up whispers about possible wrongdoing by Chernomyrdin -- who co-chaired a commission with Gore on U.S.-Russian relations -- with other unrelated allegations concerning the diversion of International Monetary Fund money. While there has been speculation that Chernomyrdin profited from his relationship with Gazprom, a big Russian energy concern, there have been no allegations that he stole IMF money." Washingon Post, 10/12/00

2. Bush: "We got one [a hate crime law] in Texas, and guess what? The three men who murdered James Byrd, guess what's going to happen to them? They're going to be put to death ... It's going to be hard to punish them any worse after they get put to death....We're happy with our laws on our books."

Fact: "The three were convicted under Texas' capital murder statute...The state has a hate crime statute, but it is vague." LA Times, 10/12/00.
"The original Texas hate-crimes bill, signed into law by Democrat Ann Richards, boosted penalties for crimes motivated by bigotry. As Gore correctly noted, Bush maneuvered to make sure a new hate-crimes law related to the Byrd killing did not make it to his desk. The new bill would have included homosexuals among the groups covered, which would have been anathema to social conservatives in the state." Washington Post, 10/12/00

3. Bush: bragged that in Texas he was signing up children for the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) as "fast as any other state."

Fact: "As governor he fought to unsuccessfully to limit access to the program. He would have limited its coverage to children with family incomes up to 150 percent of the poverty level, though federal law permitted up to 200 percent. The practical effect of Bush's efforts would have been to exclude 200,000 of the 500,000 possible enrollees." Washington Post, 10/12/00

4. Bush: "He [Gore] is for registration of guns."

Fact: "Gore actually favors licensing for new handgun purchasers but nothing as vast as registering all guns." Salon, 10/12/00

5. Bush: Said he found Gore's tendency to exaggerate "an issue in trying to defend my tax relief package. There was some exaggeration about the numbers" in the first debate.

Fact: "No, there wasn't, and Bush himself acknowledged that the next day on ABC's Good Morning America when Charlie Gibson pinned him on it." Salon, 10/12/00

There are many more.

Instead of bashing Bush, why not come up with good ideas about
universal health insurance for all Americans?

Miller, what are your thoughts? Show me yours and I'll show you mine.

The issue is afforable health insurance for all.

(Not health care)

Oh, another literalist. BTW, health care and health insurance are tied together.

Okay, what about health insurance?

It's time to regulate the insurance industry, but that's a big-time dream!

Is that it?

Our system of health insurance firms has been a disaster, and it should be eliminated. There is a multitude of such firms, and they play games with their insureds, physicians, and hospitals. Frequently, they will, through some ruse or another, delay payment in order to hold on to funds longer. They exclude people with certain health problems, and try to weasel out of paying charges on spurious grounds.

There should instead be a single-payer, which would be the federal government or a nonprofit firm.

Does this mythical "universal" health care cover dental,optical,hearing,prescriptions,chiropractic,any other forms of alternative medicine,elective surgery,overseas medical care,and anything else someone claims they need as health care?

What does Medicare cover?

MM. a literalist would have trouble with the word "universal."

I suggest that you look at other countries to see what their plans cover.