The Democrats have the best plans but the Republicans have a better information delivery system in almost all policy debates.
If you listen to Paul Ryan speak about health insurance you realize that he is a terrific speaker with a facility for presenting lies as truth. The Republicans want to repeal Obamacare but they have no replacement for it. Almost every president since Roosevelt has tried to create a healthcare plan. So why is everyone so pissed at Obama for finally pushing one through. Surely we got nothing in the eight years of Bush or the forty odd years before him.
Ryan keeps saying that it’s either the people or the government who will run healthcare. What he really means is that it will be the insurance companies or the government and we already know what a great job the insurance companies have been doing. Patient centered care, the plan the Republicans are talking about doesn’t work because no one really has the choices that the Republicans claim are the basis of the plan. In normal healthcare people don’t have choices. Not really.
People, because of the inhibiting nature of illness, find a doctor they trust and then stay with him until he dies or they do. They go to the hospital that is nearest or that treats a particular disease. They go to the labs that the doctors or hospitals use because they don’t have competitive information available. There really are no choices. We don’t have all this knowledge of who, what and where that would allow us to make the kind of informed choices that the Republicans are talking about because unlike these politicians, we are trying to make an honest living and just don’t have the time to research all this information. If we did, we would be in the healthcare business instead of plumbing or accounting or whatever. So the choices really aren’t there, but in a state run system they would be, because they would already have been researched and vetted by those who were appointed by the system to do the vetting. This has its own dangers but it’s still far better than what we have now or what the GOP envisions.
The decision by the government to eliminate the Community Living Assisted Service & Support program shows that for any program like it to work it must be mandatory. This program wasn’t and nobody joined it until they actually needed the service, so there was never enough money in it to do the job. If people had been forced to join the program before they actually needed it, there would have been enough money in the program to treat the members when they needed help. It’s just the way insurance works. It’s why the Obama plan has mandates in it.
How do the private insurance companies make their system work? By charging huge premiums to compensate for the fact that people tend not to join until they need medical help. That’s why the Medicare system is going broke. The government can’t afford the premiums. This isn’t metaphysics or politics, it’s just simple math, which being a science is far too complicated for the average Republican mind to grasp. If this is too hard to understand, then you have no right to an opinion.
Let’s make it very simple. Many people don’t buy private insurance until they think they are going to need it. So private insurance doesn’t have a backlog of premiums to spread out their costs for claims. Result: private insurance costs are sky high. In addition, until Obamacare the insurance companies didn’t take on sick people. Now they are forced to, but to balance that out, the President’s plan called, originally for people to be mandated to join.
Medicare doesn’t enroll people until they are 65, a time when they are in need of the majority of the medical care they will use in their life but Medicare premiums remain modest, much lower than private insurance premiums because they don’t have to make a profit. They have no sales or advertising costs, no big corporate bonuses to pay and only the insurance companies as competition.
The costs of care are the same regardless of what kind of insurance you are using so it was a foregone conclusion that Medicare, despite its lower cost of delivery, but with lower premiums and therefore much less income than private insurance would run out of money and start getting additional funds from the government. This they did to such a degree that they are about to bankrupt us.
So what’s the answer? The Republicans say it’s to give all the business to the private companies. Then the private companies can give the business to us
What Obama wanted but caved on was to create a single payer system in which healthcare was universal and mandatory and people had to join it as soon as they left their family or by say 25. The money that was not being used by the younger members of the system because they were healthier would balance things out; act to offset the costs of treating problems in later life.
But there will always be people who can’t or won’t join the team. What do you do about them? Fining a guy who can’t pay his healthcare premium isn’t really a solution. If he can’t pay the premium, he can’t pay the fine.
No, the only answer, the one used by most civilized nations in this century, is universal health care. Why didn’t Obama go for that? Because he knew he wouldn’t even get his own people to go for it. It smells too much of socialism and we know how American’s feel about that. Most just don’t understand that this government. and every government that works, has as its duty the implementing of social programs that benefit its people.
The perfect example, Social Security, is the most successful social system ever devised my man. We start paying into it at an early age and we use it at a later age when we need it. I know, the Republicans keep yelling that it isn’t working, that it must be privatized, that it is causing the deficit. But they lie. Yes, it’s that simple. Republican’s lie. When they are speaking about the deficit, social security, taxes, Medicare or Medicaid, a long as their lips are moving they are lying. They have demonstrated this over and over, so many times, in fact, that it is no longer a matter of dispute, even within their own circles.
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Almost across the pundit board this weekend, the message was that Occupy Wall Street had no solutions. Duuuh? Bret Stevens, appearing on GPS was dumb enough to say that the demonstrators had to either demonstrate or discuss. What he fails to get is that not discussing, but simply stating their facts, keeps those facts from being dismissed. The OWS people are not the only ones who don’t want to discuss. The 1% doesn’t want to discuss the ways they have ruined the economy either because the result of such discussions will be indictments. Contrary to the beliefs of aging ultra conservatives like Steve Forbes the Fed didn’t cause this problem. It took Paul Krugman to explain that unregulated Wall Street and the banks caused it. Chrystia Freeland has pointed out that the Wall Street guys are not bigger thieves than anyone else but the relaxation of regulations encouraged them to do what they are wont to do; run amok with other people’s money. They will do it again if allowed to.
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I listen to David Axelrod and all I hear is stuttering double talk. Can’t Obama find someone who can deliver a clear concise message better than this guy? He’s one of the principle problems of getting out the message in an administration that has explaining its positions, as one of its biggest problems. Watching him try, pathetically, to explain why the Jobs Act didn’t make it through congress was painful and when he was through I was almost convinced that it should fail.
And why are Democrats voting against it. This is a typical Democratic failure. Get it together. The Republicans managed to hold firm against the whole nation on the debt ceiling. The pathetic Dems can’t even pass one vote together.
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Watched Bobby Jindal on Meet the Press a couple of weeks ago. He is truly a national disgrace. He lied from his first sentence and for the rest of the show. Even in the few minutes when he wasn’t flat out lying, he was twisting the truth to make an untrue point. He finished seventh in a straw poll on Republican Vice-Presidential candidates. Why so high? Let’s hope the swamp lizard stays in the bayous.
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Speaking of lying and the historical fact that most politicians indulge. Most of us were brought up to always tell the truth with the disclaimer that there were times when the telling off a small lie was preferable to causing someone pain, embarrassment or humiliation. The present day Republican Party has extrapolated this position into one where the truth is only relevant when it can be used to ones advantage. At all other times, it seems, lies are preferable. It’s a shame that we are now living in such a world. Maybe we can fix that by getting rid of these slime and replacing them with people who at least understand what the truth is.