No, sarcasm. People can call Obama a monkey all they want. Risky's fanciful notion that someone would get banned for it is incorrect. We're a bit more chilled than that.
Yes seemed odd choice to me. Surely going with someone more moderate to try and win over moderates would have made more sense as an election strategy than someone who is only going to please those who were going to vote republican anyway.
Romney has correctly identified that the state of the govenment's finances is the biggest issue for the next president and has selected the a VP candidate that has been attempting to do something about this from the house. He's only "extreme" in that he wants something to be done rather than just spending away with no plan to pay for any of it. Futhermore he's certainly not one that has sat on the fringe never proposing anything that isn't 100% just to record votes for a claim a perfect pure record.
Paul Ryan is known for being a "deficit hawk." However, while George W. Bush was in office, he voted for nearly every unpaid-for bill, including huge tax cuts, T.A.R.P., the Bush highway bill, the two wars (Afghanistan and Iraq), and the Medicare Prescription Part "D" plan. The latter was a major gift to the pharmaceutical companies as it forbid negotiating prices on drugs and made it illegal for individuals to obtain cheaper prescription drugs from outside the country (i.e., Canada.) It seems the only things Ryan believes it cutting are programs which help those who are less fortunate, including Medicaid. It is interesting he has proposed making Medicare into a voucher program where a person would use that to obtain their own insurance from a private company instead of using the current government system which works fairly well. The picture begins to come into focus when you realize Ryan's wife was a registered lobbyist for various pharmaceutical and health insurance companies.
Are you referring to the program that is projected to be insolvent in about 11 years? The same program that the current administration cut by $716B in order to fund the "Affordable Care Act"? As opposed to the current administrations program that will fine you if you refuse to buy private insurance?
I've never heard anyone ever say medicare works remotely well. It certainly needs change but from an election perspective i can only see Ryan's plan losing him a lot of elderly votes. Unfortunately the two biggest expenses on the U.S. budget of Social Security and defense are probably the two that it's electoral suicide to touch.
That's a right-wing talking point about the $716B. That figure comes from efficiencies found within the Medicare programs. No benefits to Medicare subscribers were cut, nor were payments to medical providers. I'm not at all saying that Medicare doesn't need to be made smarter and more efficient; it is clear that it does. However, it is able to provide what it does fairly well and at a much lower overhead than the private sector. I cannot tell you how happy I am to be on it. In fact, the Affordable Care Act has already saved me several hundred dollars on prescription medications. In addition, I have received some preventive tests (like one for colon cancer and well-woman exams) without an additional co-pay. The thing Congress should do is amend Bush's original bill for Medicare Part D and allow the government to negotiate/bid on drug prices, which it currently does not. I would think a person who believes in personal responsibility would want to have health insurance coverage for themselves and their family rather than have an accident befall them, ending up in an emergency room and foisting the cost upon the taxpayers. If someone already has coverage, nothing at all needs to be done. In order for premium costs to be reasonable and in range, states are forming insurance exchanges for individuals and families to be covered. It seems very reasonable to me seeing as we don't have a single-payer system. Healthy people need to be in the pool for the system to work. Back in the 18th century Congress required merchant marines to have health coverage. I don't see a problem.
Actually, payments to providers are cut (hence the bragging on bringing "costs" down"). I'm not reading talking points I'm reading the CBO Reports which concludes that repealing the ACA would reduce the deficit by over $1T on a program that was supposed "Not add a dime to the deficit". A vast majority of people who don't have health insurance that the ACA is going after is people who don't need all the items listed mandated by individual states and they do CHOOSE not to have insurance. Someone from the age of 18-26 both categorically and statistically have less need for comprehensive insurance, they are also the lowest wage earners (and currently, among the highest unemployed). Yes, young and healthy people probably should have catastrophic coverage for things like car accidents but those policies are not available in the market because of state intervention and federal intervention preventing policies to be sold across state lines. You say that they would want to, then why the financial penalty if they don't? Because they are healthy and don't need regular medical care and they needed to subsidize the people who do. What I'm reading is actually YOU think they should - their actions show otherwise. Another touted feature of the law that was supposed to "lower costs" was the CLASS act portion. Turns out people weren't interested and it was shut down arbitrarily. You can try to anticipate what people want but you can't make them want it, only make them do it. To some degree that is exactly how insurance works, it dilutes the amount of risk among a group of people. The problem I have is when they did have a choice, they decided it wasn't worth what little money they had and now they don't. A and B voting to take money from C to give to D is the worst form of democratic mob rule.
Can you name me the government system/philosophy where people don't die? The USSR had "free" healthcare (single payer) and more people died in that system than any other. I fear this is going to deteriorate into the same old argument... Do you pull drivers out of their car due to the possibility of accidently hitting someone (I guess more accurately, would you expect the police to do it for you)? This butterfly effect argument is not a practical context for discussion.
I never trust where a goverment budget proposal (from right or left) invlcudes a figure from "efficiency savings". Saving money isn't natural to public bodies where there isn't a P&L and thus you're judged on your output (or more accurately your input of cash). If efficiencies are there to be made they should be making them anyway of someone out to be fired for wasting money. Book the saving in the budget after it appears. Meantime if the politicians want so spend more they have to tax more and if they want to spend less then somethign has to be cut. "Effiency savings" are just smoke and mirrors for some amount of money that's goign to add to the deficit by year end.
Scirocco I always get suspicious when politicians claim they are making savings through "efficiencies". It sounds good but they are hard to achieve and even harder to quantify and demonstrate. The savings often take several years to manifest themselves by which point the electorate have forgotten the original promises. That is not to knock the intent as a more efficient system benefits us all but it's an easy way to cover a black hole in your figures. [EDIT] Ninja'd by Risky! [EDIT] Eddie I have a general question. I don't know enough about the US health care system to get involved in a detailed discussion about the pro's and con's of what each side is suggesting so I will keep it to a more strategic level. Universal government provided free health care is expensive but it should lead to a healthier, more productive and less stressed workforce. Is that worth the economic cost?
People will always die, but what i notice is that if you have no health insurance or the insurance you have does not cover your health problem then you are seriously boned, you will die from something that is preventable and curable. Yes we do, we stop them when we notice that they may pose a risk to other people (drunk driving, drugs, talking on your cellphone, etc...). I am not talking about butterfly effect, i am talking about being less hypocrite as possible and having as few double standards as possible. IF you want to kill free healthcare and make everyone responsible for their own health... then go for it. When crap hits the fan don't run away, face the consequences of your choice. I was thinking more of comparing the UK health system, the Canadian health system and the US health system... costs vs performance wise. Not with the USSR, they had to cut costs on almost everything to feed the cold war.
My point exactly, you don't pull EVERYONE. The capabilities of others don't get penalized for the inequities of a few. The USSR was a large bureaucracy that was spending more than it took in to wage an arms race. The resources spent on defense spending was at the cost of everything else and the total amounted to more than they produced. The US currently borrows 40% of everything it spends ON THE FEDERAL LEVEL ALONE. The largest amount of spending in our federal budget is entitlements by a wide margin and now we are adding more. Sounds like the exact same thing to me. The examples of the successful socialized health systems are at a smaller scale that in line with the state of California (broke). If/When this cripples our nation some my find satisfaction that our fall was caused in the name of saving people from themselves as opposed to building too many weapons but not me because the results will be the same.
