Comments Posted By Travis Monitor
Displaying 91 To 100 Of 175 Comments
YOU COULDN'T PAY ME TO BE A DOCTOR
"large numbers of people weren’t able to afford the food that companies WERE willing to sell to them"
Maybe if we forbade interstate commerce in food like we forbid interstate commerce in health insurance we could get to that point.
Comment Posted By Travis Monitor On 22.08.2009 @ 22:52
Allow people to buy insurance across state lines first and *then* determine hte cost of it.
"Well, in some ways we do have measures to ensure that people don’t go without food (food stamps, subsidized school lunches, etc)."
BINGO! There is nothing in the food industry that requires govt to takeover our private farm - supermarket - refridgerator food chain for 85% who can take care of our food needs in order to supply it to the 15% who cant.
The analogy to food stamps is simple: We need govt subsidized HSAs and insurance. Instead of mandates, rules, insurance boards and 'public option', we simple need to provide subsidies for those who cannot afford health insurance on their own.
Comment Posted By Travis Monitor On 22.08.2009 @ 22:50
HEALTH CARE REFORM TEETERING ON THE EDGE OF FAILURE
"But are the town hall voices representative of America?"
Rasmussen now has over 40% of voters *strongly* opposed to Obama and to Obamacare, and a majority opposing Obama. Very early for 'The One' to fall under the crucial 50% mark." When I look at those protesters, I see that 99% of these folks are white, over 40, and lower/middle class."
(A) That's false generalization (what about that College kid that stumped BHO in Colorado?), (B) that still covers at least half the voters, and surely represents 'mainstream America' and (C) How did you detect the 'class'? The lack of ascots? No Benzes and Jaguars in the parking lot?
Comment Posted By Travis Monitor On 17.08.2009 @ 19:25
#10: So Obama will lie at his signing ceremony just as he's been lying at his Pokemkin-village phony townhalls. Fascinating.
The individual mandate and the small business mandate ARE middle class tax hikes. Of course they dont call it that, but they are; business mandate is payroll taxes; income tax reporting with penalties for failure to spend money as spec'd by govt, with fine for failure to do so = taxes.
Comment Posted By Travis Monitor On 16.08.2009 @ 22:26
#7: "It is my opinion that the main cause of increasingly higher health care costs is the American Public. We want it all, we want it now, and we don’t want to pay for it. It’s that simple."
While I agree that Americans will not tolerate a system of rationing, as odious both to our freedom and our health, I disagree that we have to resign ourselves to an expensive healthcare system and that the American Public is to blame.
There are 3 structural issues, and 3 structural fixes:
1. The American public is not in favor of defensive medicine, which sucks up a good amount of medical costs, and is a result of over-litigious actions against doctors. Solution: Medical tort reform.
2. The 'we dont want to pay for it' statement actually should state that 'we do not pay for health costs directly as we do with other goods'. only a fraction of healthcare costs are direct payer. What IS the way to go is to get more direct payment of medical costs and move away from kitchen-sink style health insurance. If people have to pay a portion of health costs directly, they will act more like rational consumers and less like kids in a candy store. Solution: Allow 'bare bones' health insurance, allow getting health insurance across state lines, have 'healthcare savings accounts.'
3. We choose to have healthcare to cover diseases and the 'frontier' of research has been to grapple with more and more challenges. We've made great progress, but the 'cost' of progress in healthcare is a rampup in how much we spend on care, from expensive neo-natal care to kidney dialysis. In short, technology got us into this fix, and an entirely different set of technologies could be used/applied to greatly reduce the cost of healthcare delivery. Remote diagnosis (imagine getting a consultation by videophone), leverage nursing, posting prices, standardizing medical data, reducing the overhead of hospital stays, less invasive procedures. The list of possibilities is endless. Solution: If we directed some of the $40 billion the NIH spends to the challenge of "reducing direct medical costs", we could fundamentally change the medical cost equation with new technologies targetted at medical care cost reduction.Rationing is NOT the way to go so long as it doesnt change this cost equation; It doesnt work as an effective economic principle. Likewise, other bureaucratic solutions will end as failures. Instead, we should focus on tort reform, recasting healthcare in more direct payer ways, and technologies for low-cost medical care. THAT will solve the problem.
Comment Posted By Travis Monitor On 16.08.2009 @ 18:30
"it doesn’t obviate the fact that health care reform is a necessity"
I call baloney on this meme, which is only convenient for those mindlessly advocating bad ideas.
ObamaCare will make a flawed but mostly working system worse.
It is worse than doing nothing. Ergo, if the choice is ObamaCare or no bill this session, then health care 'reform' is NOT a necessity. Most Americans btw agree with me (check the Rasmussen poll).The ONLY necessity of new laws is same as the Hippocratic oath's first duty - "Do No Harm". If only legislator's would heed that rule!
It is people like you who is going to make America a second class economic power. Refusing to support any reform is tantamount to accepting the fact that health care costs are going to continue to skyrocket out of control and that within a decade, we will be forced to make even harder choices on defense, and other federal necessities that will make us weaker than Canada.Reform is the only option to avoid catastrophe.
ed.
Comment Posted By Travis Monitor On 16.08.2009 @ 16:55
"But you’ll notice that opposition is centered almost entirely on the public option. "
Wrong. There are multiple outrages in ObamaCare.
1. Tax hikes
2. Squeeze on Medicaid will suck state budgets dry (unfunded mandates anyone?)
3. Mandates, Mandates, Mandates - THEY DONT WORK. See Massachusetts. Individual mandate is particularly odious as it amounts to a massive tax hike on self-employed people making $50-$100k and barely scraping by. But the mandate on small business will also KILL JOBS at a time when we cannot afford to lose them.
4. The 'death consultations' are just a part of the 'deathcare' problem, its the Daschle-advocated boards that will over-rule doctors decisions and mandate/control care. This is building the infrastructure for govt takeover and to deny it is to engage in Orwellian double-talk and 'trust me' simplifications.
5. Taxpayer-funded abortions. Sen Hatch caught Sen Mikulski slipping it in. We will have taxpayer funded abortion unless they Reaffirm the Hyde Amendment and stop the backdoor funding of abortions.
6. $10 billion giveaway to union health plans. "Power corrupts".
the list goes on.Obama was right. Public Option is "just one sliver" of what is wrong with ObamaCare.
"Obama doesn’t care who gets credit, or what people say about him."
This is such an obvious and fishy lie, I'm sending it to flag@whitehouse.gov.
Comment Posted By Travis Monitor On 16.08.2009 @ 16:47
Please, all credit goes to him and any dissent is unpatriotic 'mob' behavior; you are slandering the Cult-of-Personality Disorder President!
"In this, I am reluctantly forced to agree."
Why reluctant? Why not acknowledge that anything that Pelosi and Waxman and the leftwing Democrats can support will be so awful that the best we can hope for is for the Democrats to incompetently do no harm prior to November 2010 and for their bloated majorities to get cut down so that the threat of bad legislation is greatly reduced.
"Simple reforms like allowing insurance companies to sell across state lines, easing rules that insurance companies must include a host of specific mandates in coverages, tort reform, and ... " whoa nelly ... that's the *McCain* and GOP set of proposals you are talking about. This a pipe-dream until we get a better Congress, and for that, see above.
Best possible outcome:
1. Nothing passes in this session
2. GOP wins Congress in 2010 and the above set of proposals become part of (bi)partisan reform. Obama vetoes and becomes one-terms or passes the conservative reforms and survives a la Clinton with welfare reform.Probable outcome:
Comment Posted By Travis Monitor On 16.08.2009 @ 16:39
1. Dems pass a hacked-up bastardized health care deform package that satisfies nobody.
2. GOP wins Congress in 2010.
3. Anything good the GOP does is vetoed by Obama. We muddle through until 2012 and dump The One.
#5: Mark in Boston.
If your options in Mass. are so gosh-darned awful, why oh why, do you support attempts to inflict the Massachusetts health insurance Mandate failure on the rest of us?And btw, if healthcare is a right, then single-payer, by denying my right to choose my own healthcare providers and insurers, is a denial of healthcare rights. Single-payer is collectivist nonsense.
Comment Posted By Travis Monitor On 16.08.2009 @ 22:40
REFLECTIONS ON WALTER CRONKITE AND THE DEATH OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM
Cronkite was respected in part because there was no reference point or alternative views to observe or contrast his bias. One major problem with the liberal media bias of the Cronkite era you mention was their blindness to their own subjectivity and the myth-creation of an 'objective media', when in fact it was anything but. They could get away with it because the liberal media had a virtual monopoly on national inside-the-beltway news for many decades.
Yet through a historial lens, we can review how for example CBS / 60 minutes went after Genl Westmoreland, Cronkite's famous declaration that Tet was a defeat for the US (a dubious claim now we know that it decimated the VietCong), etc.
Now that we live in a world of a plethora of news and opinion sources, anyone can triangulate where any particular news source is, in terms of their reliability, objectivity, and bias. If you have any questions, you can always go to http://newsbusters.org or other media 'watchdog' places to see what critics have to say about it.
Comment Posted By Travis Monitor On 18.07.2009 @ 19:35
