Bitt, sorry if the thread is gone awry. I did consciously wait until it was down on page 3 or 4!
No one will ever get any positive credit for the economy or the war. Might as well wait for Godot.
On the contrary, I think if Obama did not get ensnared in this fake town hall battle for the health care right-of-center, his popularity ratings would be higher now and they could be even higher next year if unemployment bottomed out and started to improve. For what other reasons have his ratings gone down?
Of course there's no mention of single-payer. That would be a death knell for any reform at all.
Maybe death knell in 2009-2010. But the guy wasn't even able to utter or acknowledge or study what is far and away the most rational, greatest-good-for-greatest-number solution.
So many people are so vocally opposed to it that having the government touch health care at all sends them into a tizzy, god forbid that the government do something useful in that space.
I think the counts of screaming crazies at town hall meetings are too high. "So many people are vocally opposed to it". Well I think a lot of that has to do with how you start and develop the discussion and who you ally with.
So I chalk that up to simple pragmatism.
I like to think of myself as a pragmatist and I hear this a lot in the recent context, but when politicians go on and on about being pragmatic, it sounds like excuses to me. And special interest money sloshing around in their pocket.
The only thing I require from this is that all Americans have basic health insurance. I want them to be able to go to the doctor when they get sick. I want them to not have to worry about whether they can afford medicine or not. If that involves using existing insurance companies, fine. I don't really care. They do a reasonable enough job now for those of us lucky enough to be able to afford it. (Not that there's not room for improvement.)
I'd get prepared to be disappointed. I want all the same things, but you aren't going to get more care for the same money without driving cost out somewhere.
The rest of the stuff, as far as I'm concerned, is icing. Yeah, I'd prefer to get rid of the administrivia with a single-payer system.
Where you put this as a preference, I have to say again: 31 percent of cost.
I'd certainly like to see some more oversight of insurance so that people aren't rejected for things they should be covered for.
I didn't watch him last night, but apparently Obama made a point of no denial of care for pre-existing conditions. Great (really). All other things being equal that means more care and that increases costs.
I'd like to see an effort to reduce duplicated effort and general waste. I'd like to see doctors be able to practice medicine and not be paper-pushers. And most of those things (barring the single-payer system) are being addressed in the current proposals.
I'll have to look harder, but I'm not seeing it. I'm seeing an illusion with 1300 insurance companies casually keeping the Potemkin village in place until this minor storm passes.
The insurance and pharmaceutical industries are certainly being deferred to to some extent, but those industries employ a lot of people, and the last thing we need to do in this economy is put more people in danger of losing their jobs. I don't relish the idea of the duplicated effort involved in having all these companies doing the same thing, but that duplicated effort does employ people. I'd be happier about it if it were hundreds of small companies rather than a handful of huge ones, but there's still some benefit in having redundancy, as far as employment goes. I also don't relish the thought of lining the pockets of the already superwealthy with taxpayer money, but if that's what it takes to get healthcare to everyone and avoid losing more jobs, tell me who to make my check out to.
Pharma people aren't going to lose their jobs and this otherwise really doesn't seem like a good argument. Tobacco companies employ a lot of people. Plus, if we really took the long view and planned to phase out primary private insurance in 2013-2014 in favor of single payer, all of those insurance executives would have time to get retrained as nurses. They wouldn't be unemployed for long!
But special interests and payola have again won the day in the USA. I can't really decide if it is better to be a laughingstock or a tragic figure.
Perhaps to realign this thread somewhat with it's original outreach goals, I could ask:
Hey, Canada! Hey, UK! How did you do it?
How come you could do it and we can't?
What transformations do you think would be needed if this tragi-comic country is ever to do it?
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