If you really believe that I suggest you watch some documentaries on Hitler and Stalin and then make that statement again.
I’m not about to join in on the tinfoilhat shit and liken our president to history’s worst dictators, but that right there is all sorts of fucked up. :uhh:
A proposed bill called America’s Affordable Health Choices Act is the vehicle for health care reform primarily being discussed today. Three different committees in the House of Representatives worked together to develop a single proposal for health reform. On July 17th, the House Committees on Education and Labor and Ways and Means passed H.R. 3200. The Energy and Commerce Committee is currently working on marking up H.R. 3200.
As written, H.R. 3200 is 1018 pages long. Certain pages seem to have caught the attention of interest groups on both sides. Passions are running high. Rhetoric on both sides is becoming frenzied.
Republicans are accused of running a campaign of misinformation including staging town hall style meetings showing voters opposed to the health reform bill.
Democrats are accused a staging town hall style meetings showing voters in favor of health care reform. Both sides are leaving Washington and going home to their various districts purportedly to try and understand what voters really want.
What seems to have been forgotten in the flurry of media interest in specific lines of the bill, is that this is a proposed bill. Proposed means it is in progress. It is not final. It is not law.
Furthermore, if everyone remembers they way the U.S. legislative process works, it is not the only proposal. The Senate has its own various versions of a health reform bill. While the political battle over health care reform ramps up outside of Washington, the Senate Finance Committee is inching closer to a bipartisan bill that is looking for some middle ground.
Before spending way too much time talking about the House bill, which may or may not be revised in the House after debate, let us remember that under our Constitution, the U.S. Congress, is bicameral in structure. This means that it consists of two chambers, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Both houses must separately pass a bill in order for the bill to become law.
Before the passage of the bill which will ultimately become law, both the House and the Senate will hold public debates. Listen, read and learn but remember that what is before us today is just one or many proposals for health care reform. Don’t become too vested in language that is likely to change. Don’t let yourself get caught up in inflammatory rhetoric which serves only to inflame passions not educate.
For further info: Read the bill itself, all 1018 pages. If you read a link or a blog or a commentary you will be getting the opinion of someone else. You may agree with them but first get the real information yourself.
:wiggle:
I think this is the senate’s bill:
How does it work? Are the House and Senate working on separate bills? Did the senate bill come first and now it’s being revised in the House? Someone clue me in so I don’t start sifting through an obsolete bill.
Blowing in people? What is the White House going to do, send the secret service after them? It sounds a lot more like they want to know what people are saying about the bill.
If BED has proved anything its that there are a lot of spam email out there.
I can not believe you guys are comparing Obama to Stalin and Hitler. With all the policies on torture, spying and lying done by the previous administration I wouldn’t even go as far as call Bush Hitler.
The house and senate pass their bills seperately. Then there is a reconciliation process where they get together and hammer out the differences. Obama said he will not get involved on content until that step. The house is further along than the senate is as theirs has already passed committee.
I wasn’t comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin if you read what I quoted. I was referring to dictators. Though I don’t like Obama, I would not call him a dictator by any means. Do I think he has socialistic ideas, yes, do I think he is planning on torturing and killing millions of people? Absolutely not.
:bigclap:
As a columnist who regularly dishes out sharp criticism, I try not to question the motives of people with whom I don’t agree. Today, I’m going to step over that line.
The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.
There are lots of valid criticisms that can be made against the health reform plans moving through Congress – I’ve made a few myself. But there is no credible way to look at what has been proposed by the president or any congressional committee and conclude that these will result in a government takeover of the health-care system. That is a flat-out lie whose only purpose is to scare the public and stop political conversation.
Under any plan likely to emerge from Congress, the vast majority of Americans who are not old or poor will continue to buy health insurance from private companies, continue to get their health care from doctors in private practice and continue to be treated at privately owned hospitals.
The centerpiece of all the plans is a new health insurance exchange set up by the government where individuals, small businesses and eventually larger businesses will be able to purchase insurance from private insurers at lower rates than are now generally available under rules that require insurers to offer coverage to anyone regardless of health condition. Low-income workers buying insurance through the exchange – along with their employers – would be eligible for government subsidies. While the government will take a more active role in regulating the insurance market and increase its spending for health care, that hardly amounts to the kind of government-run system that critics conjure up when they trot out that oh-so-clever line about the Department of Motor Vehicles being in charge of your colonoscopy.
There is still a vigorous debate as to whether one of the insurance options offered through those exchanges would be a government-run insurance company of some sort. There are now less-than-even odds that such a public option will survive in the Senate, while even House leaders have agreed that the public plan won’t be able to piggy-back on Medicare. So the probability that a public-run insurance plan is about to drive every private insurer out of business – the Republican nightmare scenario – is approximately zero.
By now, you’ve probably also heard that health reform will cost taxpayers at least a trillion dollars. Another lie.
First of all, that’s not a trillion every year, as most people assume – it’s a trillion over 10 years, which is the silly way that people in Washington talk about federal budgets. On an annual basis, that translates to about $140 billion, when things are up and running.
Even that, however, grossly overstates the net cost to the government of providing universal coverage. Other parts of the reform plan would result in offsetting savings for Medicare: reductions in unnecessary subsidies to private insurers, in annual increases in payments rates for doctors and in payments to hospitals for providing free care to the uninsured. The net increase in government spending for health care would likely be about $100 billion a year, a one-time increase equal to less than 1 percent of a national income that grows at an average rate of 2.5 percent every year.
The Republican lies about the economics of health reform are also heavily laced with hypocrisy.
While holding themselves out as paragons of fiscal rectitude, Republicans grandstand against just about every idea to reduce the amount of health care people consume or the prices paid to health-care providers – the only two ways I can think of to credibly bring health spending under control.
When Democrats, for example, propose to fund research to give doctors, patients and health plans better information on what works and what doesn’t, Republicans sense a sinister plot to have the government decide what treatments you will get. By the same wacko-logic, a proposal that Medicare pay for counseling on end-of-life care is transformed into a secret plan for mass euthanasia of the elderly.
Government negotiation on drug prices? The end of medical innovation as we know it, according to the GOP’s Dr. No. Reduce Medicare payments to overpriced specialists and inefficient hospitals? The first step on the slippery slope toward rationing.
Can there be anyone more two-faced than the Republican leaders who in one breath rail against the evils of government-run health care and in another propose a government-subsidized high-risk pool for people with chronic illness, government-subsidized community health centers for the uninsured, and opening up Medicare to people at age 55?
Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society – whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.
If health reform is to be anyone’s Waterloo, let it be theirs.
Discuss.
I’m giving a persuasive presentation in class tonight. I figured what better topic than to present in favor of universal healthcare to a group of fiercly free-market MBA students? :lol: This should be fun. I can’t wait to make them wrap their heads around the concept that fire departments, police, post office, and insurance are all socialist programs but insurance is the only one that doesn’t have at least a major non-profit competitor. :eyebrow:
:bigclap:
I got in more than a few heated arguments busting out my Karl Marx side in MBA classes.
:lol: So after my presentation two girls that grew up in Europe (Bulgaria and Spain) thanked me for my presentation because they’re sick of retards who don’t get it.
One guy argued during my discussion that we would have to wait forever to see a doctor “like Canada.” I responded that I’ve never heard anyone but Americans talk about how those with universal healthcare have to wait so I don’t believe it. I’ve never heard someone that has universal healthcare say anything bad about it. They said I was right on the money. They were amazed at how bad our healthcare sucks when they moved here.
The Spanish girl presented before me on her decision to move to America. She gave me a perfect segue because she actually put in her presentation that doctors not being free was a major sticking point.
:thankyou:
My favorite is the argument that they can’t get Cash for Clunkers right, so how would they get healthcare right. These same people are typically 5-10 years away from receiving medicare. OOF. If it’s so flawed, then why depend on it for retirement?
I hate that argument. There is way more work put in the public option proposal than the C4C program. They had no idea how popular that program was going to be.
It’s amazing to hear from people about how much they don’t want “government intervention in my healthcare”, when they don’t realize how much government intervention there already is.
The government runs Medicare and Medicaid.
The government runs Social Security (which covers disability).
The government directly provides healthcare via the VA system.
The government regulates medical devices and drugs (FDA).
The government regulates hospitals and other facilities via the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO - the Center for Medicare/Medicaid Services “deems authority” to JCAHO for this).
There will always be some form of private insurance in the US because of demands from American workers. Private insurance still exists in the UK, despite the existence of the “free” National Health Service.
This will, however, create a two-tier system of “have-more” and “have-less”, which will give the Democrats more grist to mill re: class wars.
Now, what bugs me really isn’t the idea of government intervention in healthcare programs. What bugs me is that there has been pretty poor discussion of what these programs will do to contain costs. Without that, our taxes WILL rise despite what Obama has said, because we will have to pay for what we spend, somehow.
No way in hell the right will want to have an honest discussion on this issue. They will continue to put the fear tactics in full force. They want people to scream at democrats at their town hall conventions not ask questions.
Big speech tonight.
And who does the GOP pick to respond? A birther who got scammed out of $50,000 for trying to purchase a British nobility title :lol:
NAILED IT. I would be very surprised if the public opinion of the plan doesn’t jump substantially this week.
Nailed it? Sounded to me like he told progressives to lay off of it, and that it was only one of many ways to get there.
EDIT: Though you wrote “public option” not “public opinion”
I’m speaking to the “If you keep spreading misinformation and flat-out bullshit, I will call you out. Stop lying. The public wants this, it will pass, and stop obstructing for the sake of obstructing” part, and finally directly rebutting some of the crap out there that stupid people believe. The public option is such a small part of the bill that how it gets implemented isn’t pivotal.