Health Care Bill Debate

[joepistole]

Attached is an interesting article on healthcare reform that really shows how misinformed the radical right mobs are but they are too busy repeating the mantras that have been fed to them to listen or understand the situation.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_07/019271.php

 

[madanthonywayne]

Exactly, it's sad. These people will need health care someday and then wonder why the hell they were working against their own self-interest!

Or maybe you'll be denied healthcare someday by the single payor system Obama says his plan won't lead to and wish you had somewhere else to turn. But, of course, with the government in charge your choice will be, um, you'll have no choice. Take what they give you and like it.

 

[pjdude1219]

Or maybe you'll be denied healthcare someday by the single payor system Obama says his plan won't lead to and wish you had somewhere else to turn. But, of course, with the government in charge your choice will be, um, you'll have no choice. Take what they give you and like it.

in a single payer system it would be a doctor not a bueracrat that would turn you away. You would have more choice not less.

 

[Repo Man]

Or maybe you'll be denied healthcare someday by the single payor system Obama says his plan won't lead to and wish you had somewhere else to turn. But, of course, with the government in charge your choice will be, um, you'll have no choice. Take what they give you and like it.

In your proposed slippery slope scenario (present day reform leading inevitably to a single payer system), the wealthy would always have a private option - even in Britain this exists. Not to mention medical tourism. If you were poor in this scenario, I fail to see how your options would be worse than they are today. They would likely be better, since you would be able to receive treatment without bankrupting yourself first.

 

[spidergoat]

Or maybe you'll be denied healthcare someday by the single payor system Obama says his plan won't lead to and wish you had somewhere else to turn. But, of course, with the government in charge your choice will be, um, you'll have no choice. Take what they give you and like it.

So, you are afraid someone will outlaw private health insurance? There is no harm in allowing it, it will not be a good alternative for most people, just like it isn't that great now! No one is proposing this.

 

[Gustav]

this has been done here before
more instances of republican hypocrisy, deceit and cognitive dissonance

In other words, we now have a new red-state political majority comprising voters who, while professing distrust of government and disdain for the values of the blue-state minority, are only too happy to rely on Washington and blue-state wealth to keep them in the style to which they have become accustomed. (link)

back in bush's day tho
any different now?

If it's budget time, it's good to be a red state. And it's very good to be Mississippi.

According to an analysis by the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense, Mississippi has won the earmark contest in the omnibus budget package. (link)

if you republican [deleted] had one ounce of integrity, you would return the money

perhaps it is time to turn of the spigot that fills the govt trough you feed off like ravenous beasts
perhaps big business liberals should wash their hands of you [insult deleted].

 

[Gustav]

[inappropriate language deleted]
then who could forget this shining example of self reliance and free market economics....

The Freedom to Farm Act

This year, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) was practically the lone well-informed Republican senator who sought to derail this farm bill-farce. Lugar warned that the lavish new subsidies would result “almost inevitably” in “vast oversupply and lower prices” as well as demands for even more subsidies.

Conservative and free-market forces brought little intellectual artillery to the farm-bill battle. Instead, many conservatives were content to rhapsodize over the wonders of the 1996 so-called Freedom to Farm Act (the last major previous farm legislation). Such praise vivifies how few people in Washington look beyond the deceptive label congressmen attached to legislation.

Back in 1996, House Speaker Newt Gingrich hyped the farm bill as a triumph of his Republican Revolution, bragging, “We passed the Freedom to Farm Act, which includes ending the [farm] subsidies after 60 years” of government handouts. In reality, the “Freedom to Farm Act” was one of the clearest examples of the hypocrisy of Gingrich and many other Republican congressmen.

The 1996 farm act gave subsidized farmers more than 3 times as much in cash handouts in 1996 and 1997 as they would have received under the previous five-year farm bill. Wheat farmers got 50 times more in subsidies for their 1996 crop than they would have gotten if Congress had merely extended existing farm programs. And when crop prices went south, Congress scrambled to appropriate more billions for farmers in 1998 and every year thereafter. And with each new bucket of handouts thrown at farmers, Republicans repeated their praise of “freedom to farm.” (link)


come 2008...another republican vote for handouts

In two different votes today on the Senate floor, 40 of the 49 Senate Republicans defied President Bush's request for fiscal discipline. One vote was add billions of dollars in domestic spending to the war-funding bill; the other vote was to override the President's veto of the farm bill. (link)

The goal of this and all previous farm bills is to make sure food prices stay high for consumers by involving Washington in complex schemes to buy and store surplus produce or to pay farmers to destroy food, or to simply grow less in the first place. It would be hard to imagine a weirder and more complex scheme, especially when one considers it’s designed to make sure the average voter and taxpayer pays more – not less – for his groceries.(link)

 

[joepistole]

Or maybe you'll be denied healthcare someday by the single payor system Obama says his plan won't lead to and wish you had somewhere else to turn. But, of course, with the government in charge your choice will be, um, you'll have no choice. Take what they give you and like it.

Well that is all well and good if someone was proposing or considering a single payer system. But a SINGLE PAYER SYSTEM IS NOT UNDER CONSIDERATION BY THE PRESIDENT OR CONGRESS.

Insurance companies today routinely deny coverage to people today. And government is running healthcare today.

 

[Buffalo Roam]

SHOCK UNCOVERED: Obama IN HIS OWN WORDS saying His Health Care Plan will ELIMINATE private insurance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-bY92mcOdk

SHOCK UNCOVERED: Obama IN HIS OWN WORDS admitting his Health Care Plan will ELIMINATE private insurance
OBAMA AND THE DEMOCRATS HEATH CARE GOAL IS A PUBLIC OPTION THAT WILL ULTIMATELY ELIMINATE PRIVATE EMPLOYER PROVIDED INSURANCE
(Obama S.E.I.U. forum on health care 3/24/07, Barney Frank, Jan Schakowsky all admitting a public option will put the private insurance industry out of business) NAKED EMPEROR NEWS (Hat tip to Morgen at Verum Serum for the 2003 clip)

 

[joepistole]

SHOCK UNCOVERED: Obama IN HIS OWN WORDS saying His Health Care Plan will ELIMINATE private insurance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-bY92mcOdk

SHOCK UNCOVERED: Obama IN HIS OWN WORDS admitting his Health Care Plan will ELIMINATE private insurance
OBAMA AND THE DEMOCRATS HEATH CARE GOAL IS A PUBLIC OPTION THAT WILL ULTIMATELY ELIMINATE PRIVATE EMPLOYER PROVIDED INSURANCE
(Obama S.E.I.U. forum on health care 3/24/07, Barney Frank, Jan Schakowsky all admitting a public option will put the private insurance industry out of business) NAKED EMPEROR NEWS (Hat tip to Morgen at Verum Serum for the 2003 clip)

Thanks Buffalo Roam for the opportunity to put this to bed. Facts are our friends:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/

 

[Buffalo Roam]

Thanks Buffalo Roam for the opportunity to put this to bed. Facts are our friends:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/

Yes, it is put to bed in Obamas own words, spin all you want.

 

[hypewaders]

How can you expect anyone to be attentive to your links and references if you will not reciprocate, BR?

 

[Tiassa]

Punk'd?

It's not just the leftists who are noticing.

The making of legislative sausage is never pretty. The White House has to give to get. But the cynicism being whipped up among voters is justified. Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose chief presidential campaign strategist unapologetically did double duty as a high-powered corporate flack, Obama promised change we could actually believe in.

His first questionable post-victory step was to assemble an old boys' club of Robert Rubin protégés and Goldman-Citi alumni as the White House economic team, including a Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who failed in his watchdog role at the New York Fed as Wall Street's latest bubble first inflated and then burst. The questions about Geithner's role in adjudicating the subsequent bailouts aren't going away, and neither is the angry public sense that the fix is still in. We just learned that nine of those bailed-out banks — which in total received $175 billion of taxpayers' money, but as yet have repaid only $50 billion — are awarding a total of $32.6 billion in bonuses for 2009.

It's in this context that Obama can't afford a defeat on health care. A bill will pass in a Democrat-controlled Congress. What matters is what's in it. The final result will be a CAT scan of those powerful Washington interests he campaigned against, revealing which have been removed from the body politic (or at least reduced) and which continue to metastasize. The Wall Street regulatory reform package Obama pushes through, or doesn't, may render even more of a verdict on his success in changing the system he sought the White House to reform.

The best political news for the president remains the Republicans. It's a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy. If anything, the most unexpected — and challenging — event that could rock the White House this August would be if the opposition actually woke up.

(Rich)​

Yeah. That could be bad.

Not that I know what I'm talking about, of course. Or Frank Rich. I mean ... not that I would know ... y'know ... what Frank Rich ... oh, never mind.
____________________

Notes:

Rich, Frank. "Is Obama Punking Us?" The New York Times. August 9, 2008; pg. WK8. NYTimes.com. August 9, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/opinion/09rich.html

 

[Gustav]

Sending a bunch of thugs to threaten and shout at their Congressman during town meetings, to the point that said Congressmen are hung in effigy and need police escort to walk to their cars, is not how Obama "organized his side of the issue" - to mention one aspect of this.

That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can't even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.

When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage -- the transition to full-fledged government fascism -- begins.

All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations -- passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.

Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."

This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.

This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it. (link)​

it's fucking war, james
stop asking me to be polite and respectful

 

[John T. Galt]

It's not just the leftists who are noticing.

The making of legislative sausage is never pretty. The White House has to give to get. But the cynicism being whipped up among voters is justified. Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose chief presidential campaign strategist unapologetically did double duty as a high-powered corporate flack, Obama promised change we could actually believe in.

His first questionable post-victory step was to assemble an old boys' club of Robert Rubin protégés and Goldman-Citi alumni as the White House economic team, including a Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who failed in his watchdog role at the New York Fed as Wall Street's latest bubble first inflated and then burst. The questions about Geithner's role in adjudicating the subsequent bailouts aren't going away, and neither is the angry public sense that the fix is still in. We just learned that nine of those bailed-out banks — which in total received $175 billion of taxpayers' money, but as yet have repaid only $50 billion — are awarding a total of $32.6 billion in bonuses for 2009.

It's in this context that Obama can't afford a defeat on health care. A bill will pass in a Democrat-controlled Congress. What matters is what's in it. The final result will be a CAT scan of those powerful Washington interests he campaigned against, revealing which have been removed from the body politic (or at least reduced) and which continue to metastasize. The Wall Street regulatory reform package Obama pushes through, or doesn't, may render even more of a verdict on his success in changing the system he sought the White House to reform.

The best political news for the president remains the Republicans. It's a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy. If anything, the most unexpected — and challenging — event that could rock the White House this August would be if the opposition actually woke up.

(Rich)​

Yeah. That could be bad.

Not that I know what I'm talking about, of course. Or Frank Rich. I mean ... not that I would know ... y'know ... what Frank Rich ... oh, never mind.
____________________

Notes:

Rich, Frank. "Is Obama Punking Us?" The New York Times. August 9, 2008; pg. WK8. NYTimes.com. August 9, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/opinion/09rich.html

I' ll ask you to note that I am NOT attacking you or the source you provided. I am simply responding to the article.

-------socialism,,capitalism---------

You read it correctly there are 2 commas between socialism and capitalism. It has been said that the space or little gap between them is where fascism sits. That is what Rich is describing.

 

[iceaura]

It has been said that the space or little gap between them is where fascism sits.

Not by anybody with a clue.

Fascism would be well above "capitalism", and a little to the right of the center of the word, according to the regular political scales.

That is what Rich is describing.

Rich is describing fascism, but he is not allowed to use the word in the current media climate. Hence "corporatist" who might "punk" the lefties (and the country).

 

[Buffalo Roam]

Not by anybody with a clue.

Fascism would be well above "capitalism", and a little to the right of the center of the word, according to the regular political scales.
Rich is describing fascism, but he is not allowed to use the word in the current media climate. Hence "corporatist" who might "punk" the lefties (and the country).

Regular political scales as defined by whom?

 

[Gustav]

whom?

congressman todd akin "jokes" about lynching dems while frenzied, bloodthirsty republican animals cheer him on

"This particular meeting, in a way is a little bit unique," said Akin. "Different people from Washington, DC, have come back to their districts and have town hall meetings, and they almost got lynched."

The audience then broke out into laughter and applause.

"I would assume you're not approving lynchings, because we don't want to do that," Akin said, putting his hand to his neck in imitation of choking, which got audience laughing some more. "But the point is, people are really upset at some of this legislation, and with very good reason they were upset."

 

[Ganymede]

Here's what I don't get. If this is an organic grassroots effort how come they're not crashing the Republican town halls to protest Republicans about their failed economic policies that have savaged our economy. CNN just played a speech by a Republican at Arlen Spectors town hall. Nothing this crazy woman said had anything to do with Healthcare. She's was sitting there lecturing Senator Spector about the constitution. Where was this bitch and her constituents when Government was passing the Patriot Act.

 

[joepistole]

Here's what I don't get. If this is an organic grassroots effort how come they're not crashing the Republican town halls to protest Republicans about their failed economic policies that have savaged our economy. CNN just played a speech by a Republican at Arlen Spectors town hall. Nothing this crazy woman said had anything to do with Healthcare. She's was sitting there lecturing Senator Spector about the constitution. Where was this bitch and her constituents when Government was passing the Patriot Act.

These questioners are pretty intersting to listen too. They have their facts pretty screwed up. I listened to a woman at the Spector Town Hall. She said she was upset with the direction of this country. She didn't want it turned into a socialist country like Russia. All well and good, except Russia is not a socialist country. Russia is probably the most capitalistic society in all of Europe. These people are really misinformed on a number of fronts.