SOMEONE'S gonna need health care

[Lurker]

Ha!!!! The Republicans aren't inciting hatred more, it's just the media coverage making it look that way. Riiiight.

Republicans from Glenn Beck to Rush Limbaugh to members of Congress are all spouting outrageous lies about reform to misinform and stir up their base. The McCain/Palin campaign was hateful and dangerous in a way we hadn't seen before, and the same groups have extended that tactic to use against reform. We have major party players comparing Obama to hitler. During Bush, if some random nut online made the comparison the Republicans ran to their fainting couch.

Democrat party

Your wingnut is showing.

[Fallakin Kuvari]

What, because I thought you'd follow the Democrat party line that these people are being paid for?

... Have you not seen or heard about this?

Also, I said there was more media coverage of "crazy people" on this. The media didn't cover the opposite sides "crazies" because it wasn't in their best interest, with the exception of Cindy Sheehan. Both sides are guilty of inciting hatred.

[Eidolon Faer]

Actually, during Bush we had quite a few members of this board comparing him to Hitler.

One of them ran the board.

[Eidolon Faer]

And I don't own a fainting-couch.

[Lurker]

And none of them were members of Congress or had major radio or television programs. You prove my point.

===

Fallakin,
There's no such entity as the 'Democrat Party'.

[Fallakin Kuvari]

Additionally, I see people on the left talking about Nazism or Hitler on the other side too.

http://www.columbian.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ ... /708069952

Baird said he's using the new system because he fears his political opponents may be planning "an ambush" to disrupt his meetings, using methods Baird compared to Nazism.

Oh, boo hoo. Lets call the grammar police.

Democratic party.. is that better?

[Eidolon Faer]

And none of them were members of Congress or had major radio or television programs. You prove my point.

===

Fallakin,
There's no such entity as the 'Democrat Party'.

Well...I suppose Al Franken's show never counted as "major"....

[Lurker]

I didn't listen to Air America so I don't know if they compared Bush to Hitler or the Nazi's, but yeah, you're getting the idea!

Margaret Cho, Randi Rhodes, Al Franken, and some anonymous guy posting something on the Internet isn't equivalent to Rush, Beck, Hannity, the entire Fox News Channel, and leaders in the Republican Party. As Ddrak said, "there's definitely more death-threat-whackos on the right" regardless of what the leaders do... but the leaders do love to use scary lies to rile up the wackos.

[Eidolon Faer]

Al Franken sertainly THOUGHT he was major at the time. And now he's got a Senate seat. Fortunately, Nancy Pelosi is still the only one in congress that makes me laugh.

[Lurker]

Really? Morons like Rep. Joe Barton don't make you laugh?

[Embar Angylwrath]

I never said they were paid. I said they are misinformed or crazy. Based on the accusations they are screaming some of them are clearly both.

If you disagree with Lurker the only possible explanation is you're misinformed or crazy.

Get a grip Lurker, get off your high horse and consider that a significant portion of these people may have a legitimate disagreement with the proposals set forth by the Obama admin. Your attempt to portray them as misinformed and/or crazy is crap. In fact, its what's undoing the Democrats right now. They have the Bully Pulpit.. the have the voice of the President on this. If their biggest response to the arguments is that the people are 1)wingnuts, 2) fringe, 3) paid shills of some nebulous special interest, 4) itinerant hooligans... it makes the healthcare argument (and your argument) look weak.

If they are fringe, wingnuts, paid shills, etc.. then the Dems should be able to easily counter that, right? Without having to go "OOOOOO Teacher teacher... lookit what he did.. lookit what he did!!"

But lets consider the opposite... lets say for arguments sake that a significant number of hte protests are grass-roots. Dismissing them as fringe only pisses them off and makes them grow. Right? I mean if the Dems keep up this absurd line that the town hall interruptions are a well coordinated attack, then what happens when those "attacks" happen more frequently? Then the Dems are left with "We can't counter attacks of the special interests", or "I guess we were wrong and they are legitimate, grass roots protestors" Either way the Dems lose.

The best way for the Dems to handle this is to acknowledge the complaints, address them openly THROUGH THE WHITEHOUSE, and slow the process down. The Dems need time to sell this to the public. Its large, its complicated, and for most Americans, its scary. And lets face it, Dems don't have the best record when it comes to managing spending.

[Ddrak]

Bush wasn't Hitler. Cheney was Goering.



I'll admit I haven't had time to keep up with current events lately (babies are timesucks), but I don't see any of this as a particularly cohesive act on the part of the GOP. Right now they seem to me to be in fairly serious disarray and therefore just acting in opposition to whatever the Democrats are putting forward. The Dems themselves have never been a very cohesive party in any case so you get Obama trying to push an agenda, the Dems milling around debating in public, and the dying neoconservatives flinging poo from the sidelines.

Saying there's more wingnuts willing to put up death threats on the right doesn't mean anything about the GOP though. With them in such disarray, media blowhards are going to appear to have a lot more power than usual, especially with such a strong orator as President to oppose. Hopefully that will settle eventually.

Dd

[Embar Angylwrath]

The AMA opposes the plan. Mind you, this is the group of poeple that have to deal with all the insurance hassles and Medicare underpays.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/us/po ... ealth.html

If private insurers are pushed out of the market, the group said, “the corresponding surge in public plan participation would likely lead to an explosion of costs that would need to be absorbed by taxpayers.”

The doctors get it. Partha, Lurker and Harleft don't.

[Lurker]

Like I said. Misinformed.

The AMA hinted that they might oppose the public plan in June, just like your article said. When the House Tricomm released their plan in July, the AMA endorsed it.

July comes after June.

[Embar Angylwrath]

Like I said. Misinformed.

The AMA hinted that they might oppose the public plan in June, just like your article said. When the House Tricomm released their plan in July, the AMA endorsed it.

July comes after June.

One wonders why a substantial organization like the AMA can reverse itself in 30 days or less. Hmmmm... what kind of pressure could do that...

Maybe it was this????

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124801397829262869.html

A payoff? One that adds to the COST of the plan and therefore the deficit? (Which Obama promised wouldn't be the case)

[Eidolon Faer]

Actually, they're opposing it for a reason I already explained in the other thread:

Medicare pushes costs from their patients onto private insurers through some fairly dodgy practices. Practices that Medicare understands full well, and LIKES.

Putting everyone on public (ie non-private) insurance will kick that crutch out from under Medicare's performance numbers AND their ability to deliver care. It will cause sudden and massive disruptions across the entire nation's health care system.

Doctors, understandably, don't want to see that. It makes them cranky and throws off their golf swings.

[Lurker]

The public option is... well... optional. It's just one of the many plans that will be available through the Insurance Exchange. The CBO estimated that about 12 million would be on the public option by 2019, and only people without insurance and small businesses are even eligible to be in the Exchange. It isn't replacing Medicare or private insurance. Medicare will be improved in other ways by the provisions in the reform (IMAC, ending SGR, eliminating waste). And the AMA isn't opposing the public option. So I'm not following what you are saying, Eidolon. Can you clarify?

A payoff? One that adds to the COST of the plan and therefore the deficit? (Which Obama promised wouldn't be the case)

Your "payoff" is the patch that Congress does every year anyways, the one that Eidolon says is a critical step to fixing Medicare. I agree. We talked about this last month.

[Eidolon Faer]

You'll note that much of the AMA's resistance to the public plan melted away when it was made clear that the Medicare "lowball price controls in a fee-for-service model" was not simply going to be scaled up and implemented.

That is the scenario that first leaps to mind when National Health Care pops into the national debate. It's pretty much what all the previous proposals have consisted of, most notably the one that Bill and Hillary tried to launch.

Dr. Cortese called such a plan "catastrophic" but that really does not encompass the sort of "wake up screaming and covered in sweat" dread that health care providers really feel toward such a plan. Most physicians would emigrate to Nigeria before they'd practice in an environment like that. Imagine the fun 419 fraudsters would have with medical tourism...it's not as bad as Universal Medicare would be.

[Eidolon Faer]

Another thing the AMA opposes about the Medicare model: It actively encourages certain types of extremely-wasteful behavior.

Beyond the whole test-padding, intensity-and-volume-of-services thing that I have already discussed with the help of the CBO, that is.

And THIS is something that needs to be in the bill if it's going to work, but it's going to be a hard sell to liberals on idealogical grounds. The new insurance system needs to have a way to address this from a behavior-of-patients standpoint.

Imagine you're a single mom, you have a job but not a great one. Maybe you're a waitress. You're not a bad person. But you have, say, a kid with asthma.

One night, your kid wakes up gasping in the middle of the night with an asthma attack. You take him to the E.R. They give him a shot of something to stop the asthma attack (usually adrenaline) and tell you to get him in to see a doctor tomorrow morning now that he's breathing and stable. Then they kick you out the door. That's what they're supposed to do.

You can't afford insurance. You can't afford to pay out-of-pocket for an office call. So you don't go. Then, three nights later, the kid has another asthma attack and you're back at the E.R. This continues for five years, till one night, the kid finally dies before you make it to the E.R. An autopsy reveals massive scarring and damage to the kid's lungs from long term, chronic inflammation and repeated respiratory infections.

This scenario is astonishingly common, especially in inner cities.

The sad thing is, that every SINGLE emergency-room visit costs at least five times as much as a physician office call. And with that one office call, plus a dirt-cheap set of prescriptions, the kid would probably live a long and normal life with no complications.

You need to be able to tell a patient "you *will* do this, or the deal is off." There aren't a huge number of scenarios where this is necessary, but some of them are both common and unbelievably wasteful.

[Eidolon Faer]

By the way...another such scenario is "You're pregnant, and your urine tests positive for cocaine." Congratulations, your options are a government-funded mandatory trip to the maximum-security wing of the Betty Ford Clinic, a government-funded mandatory abortion, or your government-funded insurance program drops your ass for the rest of your life.