I suppose we should get the greetings and pleasantries out of the way first.
Paul Ryan, please DROP DEAD!
That’s how much I loathe his proposed and supposedly serious budget. None of his ideas are new, they are based on fuzzy math and proposals that don’t work. But the selfish throngs of the tea party as well as many journalists who should know better, are in love with Ryan and his plan because it promises “tough love”. After all to a teabagger- it’s not good government if it’s not abusive. It’s good governance BECAUSE someone is getting screwed. The alternative, that being generous and kind could have no downsides, is just incomprehensible to Ryan and the ignorant masses that support him and his fellow despot’s like minded conservatives.
The quick description of Ryan’s proposal can be summed up thusly:
Guess what, Andrew. Paul Ryan just released his very “serious” plan with massive tax cuts, huge cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, a repeal of the ACA with no replacement (throwing 30 million off insurance), and putting in place a system that will cost the most vulnerable more, do nothing to stem the cost of medical care, and still does nothing to help our long term financial condition. We’ve now seen the GOP plan, and Alan Grayson nailed it a couple years back. “Die quickly” is the Republican position……
Is this my “shared sacrifice,” and I’ll be told to eat a bag of salty dicks while they cut taxes for the Koch brothers and the rest of their fat cat donors and big business?
Yep-that’s exactly what Paul Ryan wants you to do. Your only choice is to decide if you want mustard on those salty dicks or not.
I’ll say one thing for the Tea Party, they have made selfishness completely fashionable these days. It used to be, in the bad old days before GWB became President, that the GOP had to hide its real agenda of screwing the average citizen to support the rich corporate executives behind some sort of smoke screen, e.g. “The Contract with America” etc. Now they don’t even bother-they just come right out and say it straight: “We want to fuck you over and we don’t care if you don’t like it.” So long as our Galtian overlords can be assured of that their costs for existing in society are reduced to at or near zero-that would appear to be the only thing that matters.
There is nothing serious about what Ryan is proposing-except the consequences to all but the wealthiest Americans. Furthermore, by ignoring what put us in this mess-three wars funded off the books by government borrowing, which was necessitated by a completely unnecessary and unaffordable tax cut-Ryan proposes to shift the burden of the “cure” to a demographic least equipped to be able to pay the bill. His specific overlooking of any reduction in the defense budget or any of the parts of the security structure, and the almost religious acceptance of the idea that taxes cannot be raised under any circumstances means that he has deliberately chosen to increase the level of pain involved in the solution, and more importantly left the GOP with little room to compromise on a real plan that might stand a chance of working its way through labyrinth of the legislative process.
So if it doesn’t stand a chance of passing why are you worried about it?
Because the caliber of your average GOP legislator has changed. Now they elect lunatics and assholes like Allen West and Michelle Bachmann and instead of shunting them to a well deserved place on the sidelines-they are given up front placement in the party. These people are so dedicated to the prospect of destroying anything that may be even remotely associated with improving American society as a whole, that they are willing to burn down the house in order to “save it”. Witness their rhetoric about a government shutdown.
Very well then, what of the specifics of Ryan’s plan?
Well first of all his math doesn’t really work. It’s based on some flawed and overly optimistic assumptions about job growth which quite simply are not being backed up by current trends in the economy. The plan assumes that tax cuts will set off a literally unprecedented boom. Most economists think that is the budgetary equivalent of smoking crack. Automation, out sourcing, and improved productivity-as well as a large shift from a manufacturing based economy to a service sector based economy are all market forces that will push back against Paul Ryan’s trickle-down economics.
Another glaring omission of the Ryan plan is that he assumes revenues into the federal coffers will remain constant at 19% of GDP. The CBO and The Economist (hardly bastions of left wing sympathy) show pretty valid reasons why that cannot be the case. Especially when, thanks to the way Ryan structures the taxes-only the top 20% of Americans benefit. He ignores some of the great uncertainties-such as the toxic effects of wars without end on world energy prices and its effect in upping the expenditures of the Pentagon. Because Ryan adheres with religious faith to the idea that no new taxes can be levied-it makes his assumption that non-defense expenditures can be squeezed to 6% and eventually to 3.5% of GDP is a preposterous assumption-made more so because Ryan never tells us how he is going to do it. What Ryan’s plan really does is to create the same pre-conditions that raised the deficit in 2009-revenues dropped off precipitously as a result of the recession.
Then there is the worst part of his proposal and the one that potentially could affect me if it catches on. His treatment of Medicare. There is so much that is flawed with it-I am not even sure where to begin. I think I will start with Ezra Klein:
1) Ryan’s suggestion that Medicare and Medicaid can or should be held to the rate of inflation is absurd. His budget has no way of making that happen, save for draconian cuts in both (this goes far, far beyond “means-testing”). And you don’t have to take it from me. Alice Rivlin, an eminent budget expert and co-author of Ryan’s original Medicare proposal, will tell you the same thing. But those cuts are how he saves so much money going forward. They’re the assumptions that make the rest of the budget work. And they’re essentially no less ridiculous than predicting that unemployment under Ryan’s budget will drop to 2.8 percent.
2) The idea that conservatives believe the savings in Ryan’s plan are realistic while those in the Affordable Care Act aren’t boggles the mind. For one thing, Ryan includes the supposedly unrealistic savings from the Affordable Care Act; they can’t be realistic in Ryan’s budget but not realistic in the ACA. For another, the ACA’s savings are more modest, and the law has many, many more ways to attain them than simply saying “the government promises not to spend more than inflation, even if spending less means millions of seniors and disabled Americans will have no health care.” I spent a lot of time taking conservative arguments on the ACA’s half-dozen cost control mechanisms seriously — including in a conversation with, yes, Paul Ryan — so watching Ryan propose this budget is both frustrating and disillusioning.
3) I suspect Ryan capped Medicare and Medicaid at the rate of inflation rather than at GDP+1% because when he used GDP+1%, he couldn’t get the numbers to add up without including some tax increases. (Skippy-san comment: Which is why Rivilin won’t support the plan-something she has been very clear about, and Ryan has lied about).
Furthermore, Ryan wants to repeal the ACA-which would thus repeal two key parts of making private insurance type plans work for Medicare: A mandate for health insurance when you are younger ( in order to make preventive care available-and thus make you healthier going into your golden years) and the requirement for insurers to insure people with pre-existing conditions. Life happens-by the time most of us are 65 most of us are going to have something wrong with us that insurers won’t like.
There is no mechanism in his plan to prevent the worst abuses of insurance companies from being inflicted on seniors. There is not mechanism for cost control-and since it’s individuals dealing with companies, they can simply use a “divide and conquer strategy” to push up individual premium prices. The thing that works with a large entity bargaining is the power of the dollars they bring to the table. With the right regulations in place it can work to keep the greed of insurance companies in check. Ryan’s plan is a gift to big pharma and big insurance by giving them a windfall-with no responsible action required on their part.
As Paul Krugman points out, the plan “does nothing, in itself, to limit health-care costs. In fact, it almost surely raises them by adding a layer of middlemen. Yet the House plan assumes that we can cut health-care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. despite an aging population and rising health care costs. The only way that can happen is if those vouchers are worth much less than the cost of health insurance. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2030 the value of a voucher would cover only a third of the cost of a private insurance policy equivalent to Medicare as we know it. So the plan would deprive many and probably most seniors of adequate health care. “
Ryan specifically does not address defense spending, something that eats up 27% of the federal budget. You aren’t a serious deficit person if you don’t address this in your plan. He doesn’t even begin to imagine a world where US forces are not constantly at war-which is a pretty glaring omission. The US has it in its power to remove its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan this year-with direct savings because of that withdrawal. Even assuming we don’t do that-long term there needs to be a major strategic review of US aims with an eye towards some degree of global retrenchment. We can’t afford our “empire with no perks”.
Similarly, Ryan really does not address Social Security-except to say that folks under 55 can divert a portion of their payroll taxes to private plans. As I have noted previously, without a control over how this is done, it will drop a windfall of cash in the hands of the same jerks who gave us the financial crisis to begin with. It would have been better to leave Medicare alone and attack Social Security through a transition to a CPF type of arrangement. (Starting with people under 35 and working upward from there over time.)
Probably the worst thing about the Ryan plan is its overall cruelty and transference of the burden of life’s hardships to individuals who can least afford to be put in this position. Sure, the government needs to limit taxpayers’ exposure to Medicare cost inflation. I think this plan is a fundamentally immoral way to do it. His Medicaid plan of block grants is simply deferred murder of the poor.
I am not diminishing the need to do something about the deficit-but you cannot tax cut your way to Nirvana. There are other ways to accomplish Ryan’s goals-through a balance of well thought out spending changes, targeted tax increases, and decreases and a realignment of the way money flows in this country. But our boy Paul is looking at none of those proven methods. We know why-he has selfish children to appease. But making rich people richer-while making the rest of us poorer is not the way to do it.
So Paul Ryan-please go jump off a cliff. And take your boy Allen West with you when do.
Funnily enough talks of having 2-parties in Singapore came up recently. This small red dot will not survive a shutdown. You just need enough people to vote for the wrong crazies to bring a nation down.
Allan Simpson for President……….
Better than that, David Stockman!
Choice cut
“Stockman took special aim at Chairman Ryan, who this week proposed a politically risky budget that Thursday garnered laurels from The Wall Street Journal for attacking the festering growth of entitlement costs, particularly through Medicare reform.
“I think he has a nice philosophical plan for the fiscal hereafter, two or three decades down the road,” Stockman sniffed. “But it is neither courageous nor relevant when it comes to the fiscal here and now… It’s a fine plan that starts in 2021. We need to deal with revenue, entitlements, defense and discretionaries, and the problem with his plan is it doesn’t address more than one of those appropriately. Discretionaries, yes, but it totally whiffs on the other three—which are much more important.”
Stockman points out that, at current levels, “Social Security and Medicare alone will cost $17.2 trillion over the next 10 years—a startling number. How much does this courageous budget cut from the entitlements over the next 10 years? Zero! None! Nothing! Ryan is taking a nice philosophical stand for the by and by—I call it the fiscal afterlife. But it’s not relevant to the wolf that’s at the door right now, and it’s going to exact huge amounts of political cost and baggage for no gain at all on the fiscal front.”’
Dammit, I blew the link http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-04-07/reagan-budget-guru-david-stockman-says-shut-down-the-government/
Let’s let Sarah Palin put this into a little perspective:
Let’s look at the numbers. We have a $1.5 trillion deficit this year. We’re paying $200 billion a year on our interest alone. That’s half a billion dollars per day on interest. And our $1.5 trillion deficit means that we’re borrowing $4 billion per day just to keep afloat. So, we pat ourselves on the back if we cut a billion dollars here or a billion there in discretionary spending, as we borrow $4 billion a day and pay half a billion a day in interest. The deficit for the month of February alone was the highest in our history at $223 billion. That’s more than the entire deficit for the year 2007. And there’s no end in sight. We’re not heading towards the iceberg. We’ve already hit it. Now we’re taking on water. We must find a way to get back to harbor to repair our ship of state before it’s too late.
I checked those numbers and although they are rounded off, they are basically right and bluntly you should read the whole thing. It’s very well put. So $38 billion in “cuts” isn’t terribly impressive when interest alone adds around $200 billion to the deficit every year. To use my own metaphor, we are in a car headed toward a cliff. We need to stop and turn around. And today they have agreed to reduce how much pressure we are putting on the gas pedal but not to apply the brakes or change the direction. I guess it will buy us a little time, so its better than doing nothing.
But it’s not much better than nothing and we should not let any of these idiots in Washington declare victory.
Bistro,
But there are ways to stop the bleeding. And like it or not IT INCLUDES TAX INCREASES.
We ignore some obvious ways to save money. End the wars, repeal the Bush tax cuts, set up a VAT and more importantly-make the rich actually pay for the privlege of being rich.
If we did those things we actually could live with where we are.
It all needs to begin with the tax code. the wealthy avoid paying taxes because they can, legally….GE being the poster child…
Make it simple, make it fair and ENFORCE the collection process robustly..
Lets bring all our boys and girls in uniform home. Scuttle the Navy, disband the Marine Corps(do we really need TWO armies).. Keep the airforce and use what new ships we have for costal defense. Become a “Costa Rica”
No more US AID, no more foreign aid, Israel and Egypt can fend for themselves.
Instead of paying 22% of the UN’s budget, pay 5% and let them move from New York to Bangladesh to save money.
Disband the DOE and the border commission.
Give states block grants and let THEM decide where to spend it.
Enforce a reasonable debt ceiling.
Give states block grants and let THEM decide where to spend it.
Block grants historically fail-beause the states ALWAYS fuck them up.
As a physician I can testify all the ways our system I seriously flawed. The ACA is a start. Can it be improved? Certainly and the proces shas already begun. Changes the right has insisted upon have added billions to the deficiet- the 1099 provision for one.
Want to save BILLIONs from Medicare spending? Easily accomplished. Ban self referral for lab and imaging studies. Why won’t it happen? Too much push back from the right.
The burden Ryan places on those least able to bear the burden is seen daily in my practice. Last night two young men were injured in accidents- neither one was doing anything wrong. Just bad luck. Neither insured- just working class schmucks trying some DIY projects. Both seen in ER. Both trauma protocol CT (head,neck, chect, abdomen and pelvis) plus various xrays of injured extremities.
Total ER bill will be way in excess of 15K. Plus hospitalization costs. Well insured or wealthy not a problem. How does the Ryan plan address? Easy answer- it does not.
We need to be realistic. So far the Ryan paln totally ignores reality.
Skippy,
Pull every single soldier out of the middle east and Europe and Japan and Korea with my blessing. Ditto the sailors and marines. Bring them home and send them home. We’re not really Team America, World Police. OK?
I don’t see any particular need to spend one penny on Egypt so shall we dispense with that billions $ subsidy every year which as I recall we agreed to based on the Dayton Accords? OK?
I don’t see any need to subsidize Israel either but I cannot recall if that was agreed under the Dayton Accords either but either way, no more $. OK?
Let’s stop wasting money on all these wars! I’m OK with that too, you? Pull out of Bosnia and Libya and Egypt and Iraq and Yemen and Afghanistan. OK with me. do it tomorrow is good with me. I’m also cool with pulling out of Guam.
I’m totally in favor of terminating foreign aid since it mostly ends up in the pockets and bank accounts of kleptocrats and bureaucrats. That’s a lot of money. OK?
I’m good with limiting the size of any embassy staff anywhere to not more than 100 people. 20 fucking thousand embassy staff in Iraq is just insane.
All these Partnership for Peace bs cruises can just stop now. Money in our pocket and it’s not like it was being used to buy influence or cred.
I’ve been working once again on my attitude and I know of your regard for your friend. He acts as if we all signed a social contract to pay for the medical expenses of all indigents brought in for care. You know my response. I never signed that social contract you all believe in. If you want to pay that’s OK with me. Why you think holding a gun to my little girl’s head and screaming at me to pay or the girl gets it is beyond me. I keep asking and you keep dancing around the question of, “who died and made you and the party the king of America?” You use vile language to describe anybody that does not agree with your party line. So do all your friends who post here. It’s like a fully blown “we hold americans who disagree with us in total and complete contempt and can subject them to every kind of vicious attack since they just don’t matter.” Nice place.
For the record, I’d pull every single one of our soldiers/marine/af/navy out of the Middle East with their gear as soon as possible. The result will almost be the justification for inventing TLAM in the first place. Pull them out of Europe and the Far East. Watch the results with some appreciation. Could not happen to nicer folks.
For the medical types so invested in saving all life consider this. You invested and I did not. You pay, they pay or we can bring up indentured servitude to pay off debts. Let’s not be trying to pick my pocket. I pay my debts and don’t ask more of any other man or woman.
You and your crew keep going back to taxing the rich some more. I’m OK with that. What about the Kerry and Kennedy and ilk who offshored the wealth in legal tax loopholes and pay every bit as much in tax as GE? Going to go after them too? Did you see the numbers of 100% tax on folks like the Koch brothers? Maybe a few billion $. All those rich bastards at the same rate, maybe a few hundred billion $ and yet the deficit now is measured in trillions of $. I don’t think you have your deficit cutting goggles on yet.
you guys aren’t serious.
You guys on health issues keep revealing your profound lack of even the most basic fundamentals of health care financing.
Except for the few like Job, Gates, Buffet and similar there are very very few who can afford to pay all their own healthcare costs. What with 1 million dollar life time caps and even lower caps on chronic illnesses one can easily exceed those limits.
Even if you are lucky enough to be able to pay most of your expenses you still end up paying for those who cannot pay.
The ACA is not perfect -it is a start.
I am pretty sure that the Koch brothers have accountants who enable them to dodge taxes the same way any other billionaire can.
You still miss the point Curtis-its not for charity’s sake that we need universal health care-it is because its the only way to advance our society and in the long run save money.
I’m onside with Foggy, and I might be willing to go a little further. It seems to me that health care is the main driver of you deficits, and the main driver of that is insurance premium inflation.
The Ryan plan is insane that it outs very old and very sick people into the private system, which will only inflate premiums further. That, combined with increased defense spending and another $4 trillion in stupid tax cuts, will bankrupt you long before Ryan balances the budget … thirty years from now.
In my opinion, the United States will ultimately wind up with a some form of a single-payer system, if only because it’ll save you money. But that’s still some ways off, maybe a decade or two.
I’m toying with an idea that I haven’t fully explored the particulars of, but it makes sense, at least in theory. Basically, you provide very basic preventative care and catastrophic care to everyone through something like Medicaid. There isn’t a first world country in the world that doesn’t at least do that.
Understanding the history of private insurance in the United States is important. It only became common during World War II, when wage and price controls precluded raises and hobbled the competitive job market. But once insurance became a common job benefit, premiums exploded, particularly as that generation started getting really old and dying. And all of that was further complicated by the anti-trust exemption that the insurance industry has enjoyed since the Depression and stifled competition.
Here’s a neat fact: more American cars are now built in Ontario than in Michigan, simply because the Big Three couldn’t afford the insurance coverage and the Canada Health Act relieved them of that burden. It stands to reason that you can see another, even bigger wave of outsourcing because of that.
If nothing else, some form of health care reform would at least help American job security.
Everything else for everyone is paid for through private insurance, which might still require an individual mandate, although I’m not sure. But with basic and catastrophic care covered, you find that premiums dramatically drop.
As for the elderly, if the GOP absolutely insists on having private Social Security accounts – which I’m dubious about for about half a dozen reasons – you dedicate the revenue accrued to doing what Medicare does now. Remember, catastrophic coverage is already provided, so it could probably be affordable. A number of Republicans have already called for this with Health Savings Accounts, but their plan can’t work without some kind of catastrophic care coverage.
Whoops, my paragraph order got fucked up in editing that comment. Sorry.
So, how do you pay for all of that?
If you don’t do anything about the deficit – and nobody currently is. Even the Ryan plan explodes the deficit in the short term – your taxes are going to necessarily skyrocket. The fact that Sarah Palin doesn’t get that tells you everything you need to know about Sarah Palin.
Tax increases might not be immediately necessary, but you have to get away from the lunatic idea of constantly cutting them. Cutting taxes may or may not create jobs in a normal economy, but when there’s no consumer demand they won’t, as we’ve already seen.
Loopholes and deductions, however, are going to have to be closed and removed. Mortage interest deductability, for example, is an insane welfare program for the middle class and the rich that no other industrialized country has. Using the tax code to coddle your oil companies is also boderline psychotic, particularly given the derivitive-driven inflation in gas prices.
On one hand, Republicans chant that the government cannot create jobs, but on the other they load the internal revenue code with all manner of corporate goodies, predicated on the idea that they create jobs. Am I the only one who sees the logical inconsistency in that?
Do those things and you might be able to keep overall rates where they are, at least in the short term.
Now let’s have some fun with the biggest discretionary spending program in human history: defense. Your defense budget is entirely dependent on your foreign policy and nothing is as discretionary as that.
Here’s the problem you have, as I see it. If you think that the interventionist foreign policy as personified by the Bush administration is proper, you’re not spending enough on defense. There’s a lot of bad guys out there and tons of democracy to export, and that gets pretty pricey. And as Andrew Bacevich pointed out in the wake of 9/11, the Department of Defense isn’t all that good at defense. It does however excel at force projection.
Americans make a pretty interesting circular argument when they say that they spend what they do on defense because the allies won’t. But it’s just as true that the allies don’t spend on defense because the Americans are going to do it anyway. Furthermore, you go out of your way to interfere with the defense policy of your allies. The most famous example of this was France’s leaving NATO because Washington didn’t want De Gaulle to have his own nuclear deterrent outside of its control.
At this point in history, the United States doesn’t seem to know what its vital national interests actually are. As recently as this year, America has involved itself in a diplomatic tiff between its former enemies in Hanoi and its bankers in Beijing, which is pretty funny when you think about it. My basic point is that when you try to defend everything, you wind up defending nothing.
You can probably make a very serious, solid argument as to why the United States needs the world’s largest Air Force. Trying to justify the world’s second largest air force belonging to the United States Navy becomes somewhat more difficult.
Your debt, at some point, is going to require a fundamental review of American foreign policy. I just don’t see it happening before it’s too late because of the surplus of jingoistic morons running for office and screaming from television and talk radio.
To offer in counterpoint.
I pay 100% of the medical and dental care for me and my 7 year old daughter. I think you should all see why I feel no obligation to pay for anybody else.
I dread what you propose skippy. If one squints one’s eyes just a little bit what you wrote is eugenics and doing things for society’s good. We are starting to get clarification on what socialized/death care will be like. We’ll make it more affordable by culling and denying care. Socialized medicine.
When socialists pretend to review the state of insurance in the U.S. they overlook the fact that 50 different states regulate insurance pools because the Fed stepped into the act and forbade national pools. You also fail to notice what Foggy pointed out and that is that under the current rule everybody gets access to free healthcare if one is willing to bone one’s friends and neighbors. Have money and the hospital will come after you hammer and tongs to pay and damn the consequences. Have no money and the hospital ends up treating you for free. Dilemma.
I got free Dr care most of my life. Didn’t cost me a penny. So, I defer to Foggy on any issues of medical care financing.
I’m only 50 but I’m cool with terminating every single dime of medicaire and medicaid funding. I see words like provide for defense but I never see words that claim we signed up to provide for medical care for all. One of the reasons we all deviate to the extreme is a failure to understand the basic compact of our society. Some people have decided to attribute their beliefs in what was written and agreed to and ascribe them to all the rest. The rest look at the words as written and find no justification and no contract. I’ve lately come to realize that in situations like this words are futile. Nobody is going to change such fundamental beliefs. Nope. We joke about it over here. A conservative is a liberal who got mugged. A conservative is a liberal who got raped.
I get a kick out of people utterly detached from reality. stalin wondered at the cost and suggests we might not be able to pay it. Duh. Some folks have been pointing that out for decades to no avail. How exactly do we get into paying for universal health care for all and expect that it will save money and save society? It seemed to me that if people payed for their own healthcare the federal government would not and that would be a true saving. Of course, I’m going up against people that think high speed rail would be cost effective on a continental basis. I suppose we’ll see. After all, if your life revolves around high speed rail you can always fly or drive to Miami and take hi speed rail to Orlando or fly or drive to a small town outside of LA and take hi speed rail to a small place way south of San Mateo.
I get a kick, small one of course, out of the more cars made in Ontario then Detroit. What happened in Michigan was the direct result of socialized government. They drove the business out of state. Them and the unions. Sort of like Boeing fleeing Washington for IL of all places….but one must understand how corrupt IL is. Would it surprise any of us to learn that Boeing pays zero taxes to IL and in fact receives tax subsidies in perpetuity? Thought not.
pieces of april:
Army brat
Mom’s dad and 2 brothers were MDs in Penna
Navy for 26 years
Lived in Detroit if one can call it living, blah. Selfridge
Lived in Washington. U district and Admiralty.
Curtis,
If in fact manufacturing left Michigan because of “socialized government,” it stands to reason that they wouldn’t go somewhere that you would probably describe as more socialized, doesn’t it? Why wouldn’t they just move their operations to a right to work state in the South?
Furthermore, you already have socialized medicine, as Medicaid, Medicare and the Veteran’s Administration demonstrates. The only difference is that yours happens to be infinately more expensive than anyone else’s and you get fewer results for it. As for “culling and denying care” the insurance industry is already doing that, and they get rewarded with anti-trust exemptions and a massive giveway from the Obama administration for their trouble. It isn’t an accident that insurance stocks hit a 50 year high the day after the Affordable Care Act was passed. Wall Street likes socialism more than pretty much anyone else.
As an ideological matter, I agree with you that the federal government shouldn’t be involved in medical care, which is much further than any prominent Republican is willing to go. But you’re overlooking the fact that they are, they have been for a very long time, and they will be as long as you remain a democracy. Turns out that old people, and people who plan on getting old, aren’t going to vote away their Medicare. Go figure. So your fantastical idea of having everyone pay for themselves is just that, a fantastical idea.
That’s quite aside from the fact that dissassembling the machinery of your current health care system would be even more expensive than reforming it. And you haven’t got the money. Period.
The trick then, is to bring that spending down as a percentage of GDP in a politically possible way. And being to the right of Rand Paul, who remains more than happy to collect Medicare disbursements, ain’t politically possible. I prefer to focus on things that can pass Congress, survive a court challenge, and would probably bring down spending. You’re longing Sue Lowden’s pre-World War II ideal. Let me know how that works out for you.
It’s odd that you would say “When socialists pretend to review the state of insurance in the U.S. they overlook the fact that 50 different states regulate insurance pools because the Fed stepped into the act and forbade national pools.” Well, their anti-trust exemption did that, which they would very much like to keep, and it has been repeatedly affirmed by the Supreme Court. I don’t like it necessarily, but it would be very difficult to change.
Also, in saying that, you seem to be advocating more federal involvement in the health care market rather than less. That’s hardly a federalist position to take. In fact, it seems downright socialist.
But let’s look at your point about the Constitution (which is what I assume you were referring to) providing for defense, which is true. They pointedly did not call for a standing army, which the Founders were almost uniform in being against. That’s were the militia clause in the Second Amendment came from. They also would have shuddered at “entangling alliances” such as NATO because they were all model isolationists.
Now you can argue that U.S foreign and military policy is directly contrary to the Founder’s intent, and you’d even be right. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is what it currently is. Furthermore, virtually no one on the right has any intention of doing anything to change that, even if they could save trillions in doing so. They’re awfully selective about their “constitutionalism.”
Ultimately, that’s the problem with the Tea Party. they spout weapons-grade nonsense that even they don’t believe for people that are too dumb to know any better.
One thing I’m curious about and really don’t know is if American corporations and individuals get to write off a percentage of their health care premiums on their federal or state taxes.
stalin,
Did you ever take an econ class? Look what I said about Boeing leaving Washington for IL of all places. I dare to suggest that maybe the socialized government of Canada offered them a bribe and a tax subsidy that beat even relocating more in the south did. They that govern the car business may have been total idiots but they saw the light, however dim and they left uniontown/socialism for plush corporate deal unionville with an option to leave when the subsidies run out. You are invited to tour Detroit for an example of what happens when that happens.
health and stuff. You simply don’t get it. I will shout. AMERICA HAS THE BEST HEALTHCARE ON THIS PLANET. You seem to be arguing that it should be free. It is. You want it to be managed/controlled by socialist governments who know best. You can’t show me one example of that that works. The VA happens to be a social contract I signed up for and agreed to. The rest; no. See where that takes us? I’m like an early death panel and general culler. I merely say, pay as you go. Take all the health care you can afford. Can’t afford it offers an alternative I’m OK with.
That fantastical idea is unaffordable. Public is awake now to the fantastical idea that we can labor all our lives and not pay the public debt down one iota and awake to the fact that rather than dump this on our children we’re dumping it on our great great grandchildren. Like the Irishman who expressed his regret and said that if every single Irishman paid umpteen thousand/year to repay the whole they dug themselves into it would only take a thousand or so years to pay off the debt. Funny thing is. We’re not going to pay. Talked to the old man the other day. Very smart man. Finally saw the light as some of our richest utterly divested themselves of T-bills/bonds. Frankly, when you look at that huge pile of paper you can see without a squint that it’s completely worthless. It’s backed by the full faith and credit of the US GOV who is busy inflating the hell out of the $ and will soon default on the debt through lack of choice. As Europe is showing and as the USSR showed, fanciful belief in unicorn poop to prop up national debt comes to an end eventually.
Show me the court that orders the bankrupt government to continue or face contempt and I’ll show you justice denied. Appreciate the input judge but there is no more there there. And they won’t go to jail for contempt they’ll just ignore the judge and the executive branch is the one that the ones wearing the guns work for. Like the pope, justice here has no legions or divisions and when it comes time to shed and ignore the law there’s not really a lot that the law can do about that. (Social Compact that we never signed up for either.) They set themselves above the law and nobody is above the law.
You roll over on your back wave your hands and feet and announce that it is anti-trust and the courts that did that thing to interstate commerce like it was a good thing. OK. We could discuss the merits of that if you like but I’ll just leap right up and say bs. Amazon, Google and MS can all do business on a national scale but for some reason insurance can’t? That’s your argument and you’re sticking to it? You ask about my take on doing business on a national scale like GM or GE or those mentioned above without the course boot of the fed and 57 states trampling on the business. Watch grasshopper and learn as Amazon does it every single day. What’s the movie, “You want a piece of me!” Laughing.
You once again attribute your utter nonsense sayings to the “right”. Let me assure you of this. The right doesn’t care about the rest of the world as such. As one of the right let me assure you that my government has my permission to cut all foreign aid $ and they can cut the military to the bone and beyond for all of me. Hard to labor in foreign lands under an assumed obligation if one doesn’t have the forces to do so. In any case the militia can easily handle simultaneous invasions from both Canada and Mexico. See how that worked for ya?
With regard to your last question, they did. Oh yes. And then they found a way out. Have you heard of the thousand or so companies that are friends with the won that begged for waivers on that whole healthscare thing and got them? From the SEIU on down.
Curtis,
Boeing is still pretty strong in Washington-only parts moved and they were as a function of the subcontractors they used and the merger with McDonald Douglass years back.
Oh and if we hadn’t have had to deal with stupid lies about “death panels” and the rest of the Tea Bagger nonsense, there probably would have been no mandate because there would have been a public option.
Face it-your view of health care is rooted in the past. American health care IS AMONG THE BEST in the world, but it is no longer exclusively so. It is the most overprced however. We have to adapt-and more importantly move society forward not back.
Oh yes it is skippy. And they moved their HQ PURELY IN ORDER TO EVADE TAX. Do you lot ever give one moment of consideration to what happens when doctors refuse to partake of medicaire/medicaid? You make me wonder. Wait, let us put it in another format; “you want me to work for .22 cents on the dollar”. Is that what you and stalin do?
No, I want to acknowledge that free markets are not the solution for everything. Cause they aren’t.
no no you are right. free markets aren’t what was stupid enough to buy all those t bills in China. Talk about unsecured debt!
I’ll venture to go out on a limb here and suggest that neither skippy is sitting on any US BONDS. Federal, state or municipal. If they truly believed they’d go all in and get some of the China love.
And a free market Skippy, that’s one where wages are set by demand and not by the government or by a closed shop union. Cast your eye out there and see how more and more doctors are taking no medicare patients. That’s the free market you just refuse to see.
Why do they do it? Because they can.
And I hold Bond funds of several types-are you saying I should sell them?
Are they California bonds? I’d ditch them.
Curtis,
If you pay 100% of your healthcare costs, you are turning your back on a benefit you earned. That’s just silly-cutting your nose off to spite your face. The money should be back in your pocket because you earned it.