expands coverage

That’s true. More people will be covered under the bill. Of course, it’s worth noting that we could cover all those same people at a fraction of the cost and without having to rewrite the health care system for everyone else in the country if Congress was inclined to do it.

This is not really true. The REAL same number of poeple that dont have and cant seem to get coverage, about 12 million, will still not have it. Harry said himself that about 95% of people will get it.

After this monstrosity passes, only the rich, elite and those owed favors by some bureau-weenie will have access to the quality care we take for granted now.

Very true Martin…I’m part of UFCW now (fee payer only -and not by choice) and the 50k salaried union reps always come into our store wearing their ‘yes we can’ shirts and exhorting all of my employees with their pro union, pro obama, pro collectivism propaganda. They actually tell the kids I work with that they must support Ritter and Obama because the Union and the Democrat party is fighting for their right to collective bargaining, better pay, benefits, and power against the evil corporation employing them.

40% of your population can’t afford healthcare

talk about being ignorant of the facts. Thanks for clarifying upfront that you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. Even by the wildest liberal exageration (unadjusted for those who don’t WANT health insurance) there are 30 million uninsured Americans. That’s 10% of the population. Truth is, there are NO Americans (citizens) who are denied “affordable” coverage.

We still have private care and insurance for those who can afford it, and the private care is used to help when there are shortages

So do we. the difference is that you pay for the public one, so you can pay more for the private one. And thanks for clarifying that government run healthcare does INDEED lead to rationing, which is the FUCKING DEFINITION of what “shortages” mean.

Posted by fjfish
2009-11-23 15:41:52

Well, it’s getting late-ish over in Old Blighty, so maybe you won’t see this til tomorrow, but I did want to respond to a couple of points you made. The first is that all countries which have any kind of insurance have a version of the so-called death panels. It’s part of any insurance scheme to limit what services are covered, and each country has developed their own version of death panels to decide on what’s covered and what’s not. The private insurers have death panels which decide what conditions get covered and which don’t; it’s only fitting that the public plans have the same, no?. In your nation, advising the National Health, you have NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence), which is frequently in the papers (I read the Telegraph, The Daily Mail and the Times of London regularly) as having cut off access to this drug, that treatment and recommending things like the Liverpool Care Pathway. The drugs and treatments which are spiked by NICE are ominous enough, but the LCP really does deal with getting the angel of death to visit pleasant old Ms. Tiggywinkles sooner rather than later. That is a true death panel.

As has been pointed out by another poster, that 40% figure you cited is really overblown. About 80% of Americans have health insurance, the majority of them through their work. Of that number, a substantial majority (~76%) are satisfied with all aspects of their current insurance, including price. On the face of it, the 40% figure you cite just doesn’t jive with those numbers. I’m not sure where you got that number, but it’s definitely not accurate.

Now, about those insurance companies – yes, the feds bailed out AIG, but you know who AIG are, right? Right. They’re the guys who have the current shirt deal with ManU. But beyond that, while they are in the insurance sector, they’re not in the health insurance sector. The bailout was mostly in the financial sector of our economy and also in the automotive sector. Health insurance bailout? No need for one because the health insurers have been chugging along making their 2%-3% profits for quite a while.

To wrap up, then, you make a point about how the per capita cost for health care is too high in this country. I think most conservatives would agree with you that the costs are too high here. But in having said that, there’s absolutely nothing being proposed by our legislators in over 2,000 pages of legislation which will actually lower the costs of health care and thus the cost of health care insurance.

There are things which would make health care less expensive – tort reform which limited the payouts for med-mal cases is one. Our providers over the past 30 years have taken to ordering every test under the sun in an effort to blunt the impact a bad clinical outcome might have on the providers revenue stream and future malpractice insurance rates. Unfortunately, that defensive medicine raises that per capita cost to which you refer. Another thing we could do is to let the health insurance companies do business across state lines. If the insurers could develop significantly larger risk pools and thus bring down the actual insurance rates.

Right now, the only cost-savings alluded to in all that legislation is that which comes from chopping $500bn out of Medicare over the next ten years, which is the primary health insurance for anyone over 65, or who is on disability. That half-a-trillion is coming out in the form of cuts in coverage and services, largely. But Medicare is almost bankrupt now, and the baby boomers are poised to start enrolling in Medicare in large numbers starting 2011, meaning their costs are going to skyrocket soon. Why should we put good money after bad on a public plan which is based on a failing model?

I think I’ll start making up statistics about other countries and declaring things about them I’m completely ignorant about. Its fun! It must be, just look around the world and see people doing this about America without the slightest clue of what they speak. But they watched some movies where everyone was racist and couldn’t get health care, and they watched CNN which says the same thing. It must be true!

So here goes: in England, everyone is a savvy street punk with great dialogue, I saw it in Guy Ritchie movies.
In France, the cops are ass kicking godlike martial arts heroes, I saw it in several films!
In Mexico there are gangs running wild on the streets constantly gunning everyone down, I saw it on the news!
In Russia, everyone constantly chugs Vodka to inhuman excess and you can steal a tank and drive it right down the street. I saw that in movies and the news, too.

I thought the most devastating zinger in that SNL skit the other day was the Chinese Premier observing that everytime Obama and the Liberals say they are going to “save money,” it involves spending even MORE money.

It’s been that way since at LEAST the 1960′s: the more money Liberals “save” us, the closer to national bankruptcy we come.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, by the way, that as Bambi’s performance and growing record become increasingly indefensible, our resident liberals are becoming increasingly selective regarding which thread they comment on.