Contributors

Showing posts with label Health care. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Health care. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Own It

I thought it was the right move for the president to hold a presser about the problems with the ACA web site but he needs to go even further. Jeffrey Zients (aka Mr. Fixit) should hold daily briefings on the progress towards all the fixes and debugging. In short, the administration needs to own it more than they are right now.

Another thing that needs to be pointed out that people keep forgetting is that this is only affecting about 10 percent of Americans. The rest of us already have health care plans that work just fine and aren't going to change. Even if the problems with the web site persist, most people are not going to care because it doesn't affect them. Look for conservatives to (again) overplay their hand and continue to obsess (see: sore losers) about the law while completely losing focus on what the majority of Americans care about which is the economy and jobs.

One final note on the ACA, I caught this story this morning and am wondering if the fix is as simple as it was for Randall Bennett.

Bennett's solution was to open a Google Chrome browser in incognito mode, which allows users to browse the Internet without recording the website and download history. It also deletes cookies, or information storage, after a window is closed. “I was using it for debugging in my software to try something out, as if I were a fresh user," he said. Bennett said he happened to go back to HealthCare.gov and logged in. The white screen then redirected him to the main page. Now he, his wife and 2-year-old son are ready for Jan. 1, when their new insurance will go into effect.

And he lives in deep red Utah...whoda thunk it?:)

Monday, October 14, 2013

Inhaling Inelastic Demand

The Times had a great piece in yesterday's paper which illustrated yet again how the relative inelasticity of demand in many health care markets leads directly to unfair pricing and erosion of consumer surplus.

Unlike other countries, where the government directly or indirectly sets an allowed national wholesale price for each drug, the United States leaves prices to market competition among pharmaceutical companies, including generic drug makers. But competition is often a mirage in today’s health care arena — a surprising number of lifesaving drugs are made by only one manufacturer — and businesses often successfully blunt market forces.

Exactly right. With only one manufacturer, the sole supplier can set his price way above the natural equilibrium of the market. That's why in cases like this the government needs to step in to improve market efficiency.

Of course, as Stiglitz points out many times in his book, the government doesn't actually do that and, instead, makes the problem worse.

Thanks in part to the $250 million last year spent on lobbying for pharmaceutical and health products — more than even the defense industry — the government allows such practices. Lawmakers in Washington have forbidden Medicare, the largest government purchaser of health care, to negotiate drug prices. Unlike its counterparts in other countries, the United States Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, which evaluates treatments for coverage by federal programs, is not allowed to consider cost comparisons or cost-effectiveness in its recommendations. And importation of prescription medicines from abroad is illegal, even personal purchases from mail-order pharmacies

“Our regulatory and approval system seems constructed to achieve high-priced outcomes,” said Dr. Peter Bach, the director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. “We don’t give any reason for drug makers to charge less.” 

And taxpayers and patients bear the consequences.

In trying to find common ground in this day and age of hyperpartisanship, we should look to the very simple solution of government actually doing its job as opposed to succumbing to special interests. This is where critics on the right always misread the left and it has to stop. As a Democrat, I don't want "bigger" government. I simply want better government and that means no more lobbying.

Let's just do that first and then we can worry about the size of government.

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Busting Obamacare Myths

Politico has a great piece up about the myths (see: lies) about the Affordable Care Act. It caught my eye because of a little tidbit that came up recently came up in comments about Indiana's rates rising by 72 percent.

Two states are playing starring roles in Republicans’ “Obamacare rate shock” warnings: Ohio, which said its health insurance rates for individuals will go up 88 percent, and Indiana, which estimated its individual rates will rise by 72 percent.

There’s just one problem: Both states’ insurance departments tell POLITICO that people’s premiums won’t necessarily go up by that much.

Neither state was actually talking about premiums — they were talking about the basic cost of providing health insurance.

Neither state tried to distinguish between the four different levels of Obamacare coverage. They just mashed all of the costs together, so a casual customer would have no sense that some plans will be cheaper than others.

What this clearly demonstrates is that when conservatives make an accusation, the rest of the country should just sit back and wait for it to implode. They don't have anything other than adolescent outbursts that are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Six Reasons

AmericaBlog has a good piece up about why the ACA is going to be good for entrepreneurs. It's important to have this sort of information out there to combat all the propaganda the Right is spewing about how the new health care law is going to destroy America.

The ones that jumped out at me were....

2. Cost containment But there’s so much more. Before Obamacare, if you decided to leave your job – or lost your job – and went to work on your own, you went back to zero with the insurance companies. Let me explain. A good friend decided to move from DC to Arizon. He was paying $250 a month for his HMO here. When he moved to Arizona, the same insurance company, Kaiser Permanente, told him they were upping his monthly premiums to $1200 a month because of various pre-existing conditions. Mind you, it’s the same company. But because he was leaving his job on the Hill, and moving to Arizona to work for himself, he lost his health insurance and had to start over again from scratch, which means paying exorbitant rates because the insurance companies treat you as “new” and basically gouge people who work for themselves.

A much overlooked point. If your work for yourself, you pay an insane amount in health insurance. No longer...

5. No more worries about annual limits I work for myself, and have the best self-employed PPO I could get from Blue Cross when I bought it in 1998 or so. Since that time, my monthly premium has nearly quadrupled. But another interesting thing happened. I found out that I have an annual limit on my prescription drug coverage – CareFirst BCBS will only pay $1500 a year for my prescriptions, and after that I’m on my own. That wasn’t such a big deal when I was younger. But nowadays, even though I don’t have any “grave” conditions, my annual prescription drug costs are far beyond the $1500 that BCBS is willing to pay for (my monthly asthma drugs alone cost around $450). Oh but it gets worse. In the past 15 years or so, when my monthly premiums have gone up 400%, how much do you think BCBS raised my annual $1500 prescription drug limit? Zero. And if I kept this plan for another 20 years, they’d still only pay $1500 a year. That’s criminal. Under Obamacare, annual limits are gone. Sadly, I need to switch to another plan that’s a good $250 a month more if I want to take advantage of Obamacare’s no-annual-limits, but I’m hoping that once the DC exchange kicks in, that price will go down.

Another overlooked point. Everyone on the Right is waiting for rates to go up but completely missing the point that they have always been going up and now will likely go down due to the increase in customers.

It's going to be very interesting to watch this law roll out. It's likely to achieve a moderate degree of success at the very least and then you can say buh-bye to what has been the foundation for the Right in the last five years. What will they do when it doesn't fail? Pretend that it did?

Sunday, June 30, 2013


Monday, June 17, 2013

Thursday, April 04, 2013

19 Years Later

Say the word "Rwanda" and the first thought that comes into your head after that is usually genocide. But recent gains in health care in the tiny African country are so staggering that I'm hoping the first thought will now be of a more healthy nation.

19 years later, however, Rwanda is on pace to become the only country in sub-Saharan Africa to meet all of its health-related Millennium Development Goals, and the tiny pocket of Central Africa has posted some of the world’s most staggering health gains in the past decade, outpacing nations that spend far more per capita on healthcare.

In the past decade, deaths from HIV have fallen 78 percent – the single largest decline in the world during that time frame – while tuberculosis mortality has dropped 77 percent, the most significant decrease in Africa. 


Between 1994 and 2012, they wrote, the country’s life expectancy climbed from 28 years to 56 and the percentage of the population living in poverty dropped from 77.8 percent to 44.9 percent. 

Amazing! But how did this happen?

The government took the aid that was pouring in and put it directly into social programs and enacted universal health care for the small nation. In addition to the numbers of above, the chances today that a child in Rwanda will die by the age of five has fallen 70 percent.

These are all truly remarkable accomplishments that demonstrate how real results can be achieved very easily within a generation if government corruption is kept to a minimum and level headed leaders are put in charge. The rest of the countries in Africa should follow this model and bring their nations into the increasingly prosperous global marketplace.

Monday, February 25, 2013


Saturday, February 23, 2013


Sunday, February 03, 2013




Monday, January 28, 2013

The Good News Keeps Rolling In

For all the talk about how broken our health care system is, the world as a whole is actually doing much better than in the past. Some examples.

  • Dr. Benn singles out Rwanda as an example of stunning progress: More than 90 percent of eligible Rwandans were receiving ART by the end of October. "This is fantastic ... historical. That is beyond our expectations from a couple of years ago," Benn says. 
  • Kazakhstan is the site of another moment of global public health progress this year. In March, it was certified malaria-free by the World Health Organization, joining only four other malaria-endemic countries with that designation. 
  • Nigeria heads the pack of 17 countries poised to eliminate malaria. Their antimalaria agenda includes a $50 million bed-net program, underwritten by The Global Fund, which hopes the country will offer two bed nets per household. 
  • The Republic of the Congo, meanwhile, has made massive strides in combating maternal mortality. The number of women dying in childbirth dropped 60 percent between 2010 and 2011, from 740 deaths per 100,000 live births to 300 deaths.

There are many more examples like this happening around the world and the best part about all of it is that it is happening exponentially. Juxtapose this with the sharp reduction in extreme poverty and it's clear that we are heading in something more than the "right direction." 

Honestly, it's becoming more and more apparent every day that we are heading towards that Star Trek vision of the future and it's largely due to the leadership of the United States. 

Friday, January 11, 2013

Happy!

Get used to a new word for 2013: reshoring.

Conventional wisdom says that American jobs are flying like crazy over to China. But a recent piece in the Christian Science Monitor says otherwise.

There's no official tally of the number of jobs returning, but Harry Moser, director of the Reshoring Initiative, which aims to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States, estimates that 50,000 jobs have returned in the past three years. He bases his estimate on a close read of the media and on reports his organization receives. If that number is accurate, reshoring would account for 12 percent of the manufacturing jobs the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports returned to the American economy since 2010. 

The Boston Consulting Group, a global management consulting firm, in a September report projected that returned manufacturing could bring 5 million new jobs by 2020 and add $90 billion in US exports to the economy.

Wow.

Why is this happening?

Rising wages in China, unpredictable supply-chain problems, oil prices, and the risk of intellectual property theft are making manufacturers more wary of producing overseas, analysts say.

That's the beauty of the free market, in this case the labor market. Eventually, workers start to demand more money and everything evens out as the labor market adjusts in its growth. But this isn't even the best part.

It's not just that it's getting more expensive to produce overseas. It's also getting cheaper to produce back at home. "It's the shale gas revolution," says Kevin Swift, chief economist and managing director of the American Chemistry Council. "There are low-cost, abundant sources of energy [here] now." Mr. Swift says that's a game changer for his industry: "We were being written off as being noncompetitive. It's completely changed. There's significant investment on the books ... 50 [planned] projects valued at over $40 billion."

Yes, indeed. Things are looking up for our country and it makes me quite happy!


Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Planet Earth

For all of my crabbing on here, the world is actually getting to be a much better place in which to live. There's a lot of good news out there and if are diligent, you can find it. The best place to start is The Christian Science Monitor as they are usually very unbiased and shy away from sensation. The last issue, for example, had a plethora of good news and I'm going to be highlighting some of their stories over the next week or so. This, by the way, keeps my promise to put up more world news content as well:)

The first one that caught my eye was this story on poverty. I had to read it twice before I believed that it was real. Extreme poverty in the world has been...cut by half?!?

In fact, the rate of decline in extreme poverty everywhere in the world has more than doubled in the past decade, Ravallion says. That's after adjusting for China, whose sheer size makes it an outlier.

Simply amazing.

Now, the article does go on to say that there is still a great deal of poverty in the world but we are heading in the right direction. With the changes seen in China (as noted in the article), the direction we are heading as a world is very, very positive. In fact, I think the prediction that Bono made a year or two ago is going to come true: within 50 years, there will be no more hunger on this planet. Barring some unforeseen catastrophe, there will be no going back to "Live Aid" days. (Note: this includes climate change, incidentally, which is actually quite "foreseen" and will be eventually dealt with in an appropriate fashion).

So, why has this happened? Well, mainly, it's because of us. Our country has spread prosperity around the world in the form of liberal economic theory. Communism is gone and capitalism and free markets are spreading everywhere. If countries don't want to be a part of this (and there aren't many left out there), they will find themselves on the outside. Our new world certainly is not perfect and we have had some growing pains but the increased prosperity has no other explanation. Everyone on the planet wants an iPhone.

And, as the countries of the world begin to need less aid, we are going to see greater wealth in the Global North countries. In fact, my children will likely live in a time where there will be no delineation between the Global North and the Global South.

It's simply going to be Planet Earth.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012


Friday, March 30, 2012

Fox Friday!

Boy oh boy, has Fox News changed lately. The right has become increasingly frustrated with its move to at least attempt to be more fair and balanced. Many are moving towards CNN where the likes of Erick Erickson and Ari Fleischer wax poetic on a daily basis.

But this recent column really takes the cake!

5 reasons ObamaCare is already good for you

Fox Fucking News...Whoda thunk it? Here's my favorite of her five points because it addresses some most unwelcome childish dishonesty that has inserted its shriveled penis into the lexicon.

4. The Congressional Budget Office recently cut health care reform’s cost estimates. 

Conservatives have relied on apples-to-oranges accounting gimmicks to suggest the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently doubled the cost estimates for the Affordable Care Act. In fact, the CBO adjusted its estimates to say the Affordable Care Act will cost less than originally projected. Moreover, the CBO has said that repealing the Affordable Care Act would increase the deficit by $210 billion.

So much for being concerned about the deficit...as long as they WIN!!!

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Not In Their Best Interests

A recent piece by Alexandra Pelosi (daughter of Nancy) doesn't really do much to relieve my somewhat permanent state of confusion as to why people in deep red states go against their best interest and vote Republican. In fact, she sort of makes me more perplexed.

Dominated by conservative politicians, Mississippi has the lowest tax burden in the nation but ranks fourth in per capita federal aid. Mississippi is also a leader of the GOP effort to gut Medicaid but ranks first in the percentage of its Medicaid program that is funded by federal matching funds. 

Seriously, WTF???

It gets worse.

In a state that wants to repeal "Obamacare," Mississippi leads the nation in a number of health care problems. It has the highest rate of heart disease and the second highest rate of diabetes in the country. Mississippi's cardiovascular disease mortality rate is the highest in the nation. Some counties in Mississippi rank among third world countries when it comes to life expectancy-they have the shortest life expectancies in the nation and many Mississippi residents suffer from a lack of health care access (some counties don't even have hospitals). It is ironic that the states suing to prevent the implementation of the Affordable Care Act are the ones whose residents need it most. Still, Republicans poll best in places where healthcare is worst.

And yet they are so stubborn as to refuse the solutions that would certainly help them.

Here's another bit of irony.

When it comes to education, adults in Mississippi have the highest rate of low literacy in the nation. On the National Assessment of Adult Literacy conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, 30 percent of adults scored "Level 1" (less than fifth-grade reading and comprehension skills). In 2011, only 21 percent of Mississippi eighth graders scored proficient in reading and 19 percent scored at least proficient in math. 

So, the state whose policies are dominated by Republican politics has positively horrid statistics when it comes to education.  Could it be that there are reasons other than the communist takeover of our schools that are more significant?

Ms. Pelosi offers this video as an explanation as to why the state continues to vote Republican.




Wow.

Sunday, January 08, 2012

The Issue of Fault

Today, I find myself, as I often do on Sundays, in a reflective mood. Actually, for the past week, I've been ruminating on the issue of fault and trying to figure out how conservatives, generally speaking, really have their head up their collective asses when it comes to that age old question, "Who's to blame?" If someone is poor and struggling to make end's meet, it's their fault. As GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said recently, "People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their healthcare. And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to."

So, when someone gets sick or simply can't pay bills, it's all their fault. They made stupid choices which led them to that point, so fuck 'em. Or, it's somehow the fault of the government. The nanny state has led them to believe that they will be cared for or some federal program has been an impediment in their lives and they are forced into submission with the result being a negative outcome.

In sum, the fault is with the person or the government.

Yet the collection of individuals (family, friends, community) or the people that make up the various private concerns that have a direct relation to a person's life are NEVER EVER at fault. Even though health care firms, insurance companies, gas and electric companies, groceries, restaurants, and other organizations have a direct impact on our lives, they are never at fault. It's as if individuals operate in a vacuum. And, regardless of the evidence gathered thus far, climate change is not the fault of mankind. It's simply a natural part of the earth's cycle and we are not to blame whatsoever.

In sum, large collections of people are never at fault (unless it's the federal government) and should never take the blame for bad things that happen.

In looking at this ridiculous dichotomy, I'm wondering...why are conservatives/libertarians so pro-collective? They continually speak of the supporting individual rights and freedoms yet fervently shit all over them. Down on your luck? Tough shit. It was probably some dumb ass decision you made. No hand outs here, buster. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And don't go blamin' the rising cost of (insert organization here) for your problems. You are on your own...unless, of course, it's the federal government. Because they are forcing you at gunpoint to do their bidding.

But do not, under any circumstances, blame yourself as a part of the human race for climate change. They are all a bunch of liberals using a pseudo-science rooted in apocryphal religion to hoodwink you into government spending beyond their means. Even though the effects of greenhouse gases warming the earth can be shown in any 8th grade science class, it's not your fault.

Folks, I don't get it. As is usually the case, the right has the issue of fault completely FUBAR. While I do agree that people (especially in this country), have a great deal of control over their lives and do, in fact, make poor choices that lead to negative outcomes, they aren't entirely to blame on their own. This is especially true when it comes to the issue of health care. And if they get laid off from their job, that may also be the fault of the company in general and poor decision making by upper management-a collection of people. It's a combination of both individual fault and the impediments that arise as a result of the institutions (both public and private) that we have in our society.

So, shouldn't those same institutions, which likely helped to cause the problems in the first place, also be expected to to help people?

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Do You Want to Live Forever?

I've long been an avid reader and watcher of science fiction. There are lots of movies and books that deal with immortality: Highlander, Zelazny's This Immortal, Haldeman's Buying Time, Blish's Cities in Flight, much of Varley's and Niven's work, and pretty much any vampire story.

Who wouldn't want to live forever?

To tell the truth, a lot of people. Old, sick, lonely people.

Several years ago my wife's grandmother was in a nursing home. She was 96 years old, unable to walk, going blind, going deaf, and always in pain. Her husband was dead. All her friends too. She had outlived her eldest daughter. Even the small town where she'd lived most of her life had disappeared. She was all alone. So at one point she just gave up and died.

Until then I never understood why characters in immortality novels so often got weary with living forever. It seemed so unrealistic and stupid to welcome death. But I was looking at it from the viewpoint of a young, healthy person. Who wouldn't want to to live forever if you're strong and vigorous?

But that's not how it works. We weaken and decline as we age. Seeing through the eyes of my wife's grandmother, I finally understood. We slowly lose everything: friends, family, strength, mobility, vision, hearing, taste, control of our bowels. Sure, you can struggle on life support for years, live in pain, or have your mind dulled by drugs, or perhaps worse, lose it completely to Alzheimer's. But why?

Last year the big flap over the health care bill was over death panels. The term itself was an outright lie. There were no death panels in that legislation. It was a provision to pay physicians for an end-of-life discussion with patients. Something that every elderly patient is going to have with their physician in any case, and something that was actually allowed for in previous legislation. It basically gave doctors a charge code for the discussion so that it could be properly accounted for, rather than bill it under some other category.

But real death panels do exist. One of them is the Republican-run government of Arizona. Jan Brewer signed a law cutting Medicaid payments for seven types of transplants. Two patients have died since the law went into effect in October, likely because of they were denied transplants.

And that's not the only death panel. Health insurance companies have life-time limits on the number of dollars patients can receive. The committees of the private companies that set these limits are death panels that decide who lives and who dies.

When you apply for insurance the company has a panel that looks at your medical history and decides whether they'll accept you. If you have any untoward risk factors -- say, you have cancer or need a heart transplant -- this panel of health insurance company employees will deny you coverage. In effect, sentencing you to death.

But wait, there's more! Other death panels include the statisticians who look at medical costs and decide what the premiums will be for insuring employees of small businesses. By putting these employees into their own tiny risk pools, they guarantee that the premiums will be high -- usually too high for most small businesses to afford, thus locking them out of health care coverage. If you work for a small company and have a disease, the insurance company will sentence you to death by making the premium too high for your employer to pay. Big employers can often avoid detailed scrutiny and all their employees get accepted automatically

That's the reality of health care today. We have private companies making for-profit decisions on who will live and who will die. The company can either cover thousands of additional families or pay the CEO a billion dollar stock bonus.

And when these private companies ditch you, who picks up the slack? Well, the federal government. When you're sick and destitute enough you'll qualify for Medicaid and you may be able to get some help. Unless you live in Arizona and need a certain type of transplant.

My point here is not really to slam Brewer for making hard choices on who lives and who dies. The cuts in Arizona may well be right thing to in the grand scheme of things. We only have so much money to spend on health care, and we've got to spend it on things that do the most good for the most people. Transplants are expensive and very often not successful, especially when there are other underlying risk factors, as is the case with at least one of the patients who died in Arizona. Transplants require that you live the rest of your life with a depressed immune system to avoid rejection, which is a time-bomb in itself.

I'm slamming the hypocrisy of people who railed against the health care bill and are now vowing to repeal it without offering any replacement. The core of the bill is common-sense provisions that Americans want: no limit on life-time payments, preventing insurance companies from denying coverage for preexisting conditions, preventing companies from dropping your coverage when you start getting expensive, and being able to get insurance if you lose your job.

The problem is paying for this. During the health care debate the Republicans refused to engage in any reasonable discussion of how to finance it. They ignored the nuance and subtleties of the problems that Brewer is facing now in Arizona. They made the public option -- obviously constitutional, since it's just a tax -- politically toxic, making it impossible for many Democrats to go along with it. Their only goal was to hand Obama a big fat defeat.

The Republicans need to stop playing political football with our lives and our health, and get serious about health care reform. Pretty much all Americans think we need the protections mentioned above, no matter what they think about the health care bill itself. You don't like being forced to buy insurance? I don't either, but someone's got to pay for it. Mitt Romney used to understand this, before he started running for president.

Right now we're paying much more for our health care than other countries do, for worse outcomes as a nation. People don't get regular care for problems as they arise. They wait until problems become critical and put them in the emergency room, which is ridiculously expensive. At which point their health is compromised and they'll have ongoing costs that will be much higher than if they had dealt with the problem in the first place. This is especially true with the epidemic of obesity and diabetes going on now.

The system is broken. There's too much overhead, mostly concentrated in the health insurance industry. We don't really need dozens of armies of private-sector beancounting middlemen to "manage" our health care system, especially when their interest isn't in actually cutting medical costs, but rather to get a percentage of an ever-growing pie. (Many of these companies are forming vertical networks, providing insurance and care. Which means they now have no incentive to cut costs).

The biggest problem with the health care bill is employer mandates, not the mandate that everyone get health insurance. It's just an accident of history that companies used health care as a cheap recruiting gimmick in the 50s. Employers don't pay for our food or housing (unless we're CEOs), why should they pay for our doctors? We should all be responsible for our own health care, as we are for other necessities. This would also put everyone should be in the same risk pool, since we'd all be directly insured instead of being segmented up by employer. Relieved of the direct burden of employee health care, companies should pay a tax to keep premiums lower for everyone, and to pay for Americans who can't buy their own insurance. The rate should be based on the amount of harm their industry causes to the health of their employees and Americans at large. McDonalds, Coke and Pepsi would have a real incentive to make healthier products. And Phillip Morris? Well, the handwriting has been on the wall for years.

There is at least one positive aspect to the Republican push for repeal and the individual mandate. It makes it that much more obvious that single-payer is the only logical way to do this. The Obama administration shied away from it because they wanted to the get the insurance companies on board. But in the long run I think everyone realizes single-payer is going to happen. It only makes sense. And it already exists for senior citizens, even though so many of those Tea Party protesters yap about keeping the government's hands off their Medicare.

Do we want to live forever? It's a moot question at this point. Our health care system should be focused on providing the longest, healthiest lives for the greatest number of Americans. We should all be paying for it because we're all using it: kids breaking their ankles skateboarding, young women having babies, annual medical and dental checkups. Everyone catches colds and needs vaccinations.

And at the end of it all death panels of neither government bureaucrats nor money-grubbing corporate execs should be deciding grandma's fate. She should be making her own decision with the advice of her physician.

Friday, January 07, 2011

Believing

I'm wondering what would happen if someone told me something on here and my response was, "I don't believe that." Apparently, it's just fine though if the new Speaker of the House, John Boehner says it.

The CBO just released a report that details how the House's new health care repeal law will add 230 billion dollars to the deficit by 2021. From 2012 to 2019 it would add 145 billion dollars to an already mammoth deficit. Boehner's response?

“I do not believe that repealing the job- killing health-care bill is going to increase the deficit.”

So, he doesn't believe it, hmm? I guess it's OK now to believe whatever we want. I guess that also means that he doesn't "believe" the CBO's other report that says the health care bill will actually reduce the deficit. Of course it can't work. That would mean (gasp!) they would....WIN! Waaaaaaah!!!!

I'm trying to figure out why they are going for repeal first. Didn't they get the memo about unemployment? Of course, they are really screwed there because their ideology is at loggerheads with itself. They got elected because the people of this country thought the Democrats were doing a crappy job at helping them get jobs so it was the GOP's turn. But the GOP wants the government to get out of the way so.....what now? Oh, yeah, cut taxes...cut spending and everything will be fine.

Belief is a wonderful thing.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

From The Left

We hear quite a bit about how the majority of America hates the new health care law. What we don't see is why they hate it. Now we have a poll that confirms what I have thought all along: people wanted more.

A new AP poll finds that Americans who think the law should have done more outnumber those who think the government should stay out of health care by 2-to-1

Really?

The poll found that about four in 10 adults think the new law did not go far enough to change the health care system, regardless of whether they support the law, oppose it or remain neutral.

Interesting. So the next time I have a blowhard yelling in my face about how America hates "Obamacare" I can point them to this poll?

You're damn right I will. And it gets even better.

Those numbers are no endorsement for Obama's plan, but the survey also found a deep-seated desire for change that could pose a problem for Republicans. Only 25 percent in the poll said minimal tinkering would suffice for the health care system.

Republicans "are going to have to contend with the 75 percent who want substantial changes in the system," said Stanford political science professor Jon Krosnick, who directed the university's participation.

Running on repeal plays well to the base but how well it will play to the general population is completely different animal.

And this

"I think it's a Trojan horse," Braley said of the health care law. "It's a communist, socialist scheme. All the other countries that have tried this, they're billions in debt, and they admit this doesn't work."

isn't going to cut it when you take a look at these poll numbers. Or facts, for that matter. How's Germany doing these days?