I’ve stated my preferences very clearly. The kill-billers haven’t. If the kill-billers indeed think that the Senate’s bill is materially better than the status quo, it is incumbent upon them to say so. And if they think the bill is in fact no better than the status quo or even somewhat worse, then it is incumbent upon them to explicitly reassert that too. – Nate Silver
Let me explicitly assert that the status quo is by far better then the currently proposed health insurance industry give away. Why? Because with the individual mandate we are betting with something we will never have the chance to win back, a freedom that once given away is for all intents and purposes gone forever in exchange for your $100 billion per year social welfare program. Here is a question for Mr. Silver, is leeching still a trusted medical procedure? Why under any circumstances would an industry that pushes it’s profit margins at the expense of patients deserve another dime of taxpayer dollars? I’m waiting for Nate’s logical, factual, and chart filled defense of the tobacco industry before the New Year.
12 Comments
i read a full paragraph of the post at 538 before i came to my senses. fuck all that.the hell with trying to do things or “improve” upon the status quo. cannot be done. a lot more things need to be UN-done before anyone should bother trying “do something.”
hey, look what i almost stepped in!
I miss having the passion to articulate myself at any length, and Nate Silver’s posts can be admired for their comprehensiveness, but I see what your saying and raise you another 2¢ in that one thing that should be done is limiting the page length of bills in Congress and the amount of amendments that can be attached to each one.
The bill deserves a giant bus.
that, frederick, is a good part of why its nonsense. who can tell me what’s in those pages? who is willing to read them all before voting for it? oh way, they have people for that.
Oh, and more transparency!. Biggest bunch of see-through suits yet.
This health care “plan” is the most hastily conceived, poorly crafted and doomed to failure piece of legislation to come out of DC in years. It will do health care what The Stock Market Crash of 1929 did to the economy.
this insurance bill is exactly what they do in DC. it’s a tremendous success! if it weren’t “better” than the status quo for financially powerful interests, it wouldn’t pass. the US congresses’ function is to protect, to the largest extent possible, the existing distribution of power. whatever “gains” achieved by activists “pressuring” their representatives in the house, can be easily undone in the senate.
and “gains” are measured from a bullshit starting point for debate determined by the very money interests who benefit. (this is why the single payer system never had any kind of serious hearing.)
the state isn’t something for The People to manipulate, it is something to cope with. Dmitry Orlov passes along some wise advice in his guide for surviving imperial collapse, regarding national politicians, “Don’t believe them, don’t fear them, don’t ask anything of them.”
i have to disagree with cg… this bill isn’t exactly hastily conceived. huge sections of it have been sitting around gathering dust on industry lobbyists’ and policy wonks’ desks, waiting for just the right moment. various portions of it have also been introduced as stand-alone legislation that didn’t go anywhere in the past. and tremendous amounts of work, thought, and planning have gone into cobbling together all the disparate pieces into a reasonably coherent whole.
two problems… most of what was originally in there is stuff that ordinary people don’t want but that various parts of the medical industrial complex do want, and now the democrats have let the republicans make the bills even crappier.
They keep talking about this being the first step, and they will improve it over time. Sorry, but if this is the best they can come up with given one-party control of the White House and Congress, there is no way they will ever be able to improve on it.
This piece of garbage doesn’t have a foundation that can be built on. They have turned it into a welfare program, not a program to help everyone. Welfare programs don’t get improved, they get canceled during hard economic times.
They want to expand Medicaid when states can’t afford the current program. Have they looked at the state budgets?
They don’t have any enforcement provisions that affect the insurance companies, but they are going to sic the IRS on the middle class. What kind of crap is that?
Many of the “benefits”, like not canceling your policy if you get sick, already exist, and are currently unenforced, so nothing will change.
There are decades of data and experience from countries all over the world that show us how to do this, but that was ignored, because it all says the same thing – for-profit insurance companies are the problem, and these idiots think they will be the solution.
for-profit insurance companies are the problem, and these idiots think they will be the solution.
if by “idiots” you mean “craven political power seekers,” and you recognize that “the solution” is to the crisis where insurance industry profits are threatened by rising health care costs, so they extort from congress a mandate to force young healthy people to buy their “product,” with millions of government subsidies. it’s ingenious! social solidarity with profits! sure, for profit socialism is doomed to fail, but it’ll sustain the existing balance of power for a few years (or a couple of election cycles, depending on your pov.)
it’s a giant empty spectacle, which is characteristic of Obama himself. they will pat themselves on the back for “solving the health care crisis once and for all”. They’ll declare victory and move on to another target, creating an empty non-solution for that “problem” and give it a pretty name.
I can’t wait for the pop-up version.
.-= Randal Graves´s last blog ..Quoi? =-.