Two brief points for today:
1. Sotomayor:
She will be confirmed. Some Republicans will cave. This is a dead issue. No one wants to touch a “latina” and risk enraging La Raza (“The Race” — in itself a racist organization believing in Reconquista) and the demographically-burgeoning Mexican vote.
2. ObamaKare Ramdown:
From Bloomberg.com:
July 14 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama may rely only on Democrats to push health-care legislation through the U.S. Congress if Republican opposition doesn’t yield soon, two of the president’s top advisers said.
“Ultimately, this is not about a process, it’s about results,” David Axelrod, Obama’s senior political strategist, said during an interview in his White House office. “If we’re going to get this thing done, obviously time is a-wasting.”
Mr Obama is in a horrendous time-crunch. He HAS to RAM ObamaKare and Cap & Tax and another StimPackage down the throats of the US electorate before the US electorate awakens and actually realizes: the economy isn’t getting better, none of these items will work, and each of these plans individually and collectively will bring down the nation.
Mr Obama is counting on your stupidity and ignorance.
BZ
Did you hear about how BHO has put EVERYBODY on notice that ObamaKare must be passed? Arrogant bastard!
Axelrod’s words, Ultimately, this is not about a process, it’s about results, are disturbing to me. Our Constitution, for good reason, put the process high on the list of priorities so as to maintain checks and balances.
Indeed, in many ways, pragmatism is the antithesis of our founding principles.
BTW, please see the petition on my sidebar. The image of Michelle Obama is a hyperlink.
He KNOWs he has to ram this down RIGHT NOW, no matter WHAT it contains — it can be amended later. QUICK, DO it, before more people wise UP.
I’ve got a link to a petition on this post as well.
BZ
Sotomayor is simply trading one liberal for another, net gain/loss zero. We know he won’t appoint a truly qualified judge. We have to get Obama out before he can replace one of our precious few conservatives with a clone of her.
Shop: yes, that’s why it’s a wash, a done deal. Invertebrates.
BZ
ObamaKare – take a number.
You take the slip: 4,321,658
Now serving: 2
Of course with more doctors already starting to swear of Medicaid… what will government do when doctors refuse to treat patients who HAVE insurance? Force them to practice medicine? Really do you want to be treated by a doctor who is forced to treat you? Of course you won’t get that option as they can just quit… that will leave you with people practicing medicine who are true humanitarians and LOVE being bureaucrats at the same time.
I’ve already had one of my best specialist head into that territory and now can no longer afford to see him. And I perfectly understand why he did that: he has had enough of being told what to do in his practice for his patients by bureaucrats, and these are just normal insurance company types.
Not only is the current system breaking down, but the proposed ‘cure’ will start to drop life expectancy and make us more vulnerable to diseases now thought eradicated. We used to have a Nation where people understood their health, limited their treatments and knew their doctor… and paid far less as a percentage of their budget than we do today. It isn’t the cost of medications… nor of treatment… its the interstitial costs that add on to the final total that have gone from zero to astronomical. The Internet spawned the concept of ‘disintermediation’: we need that with health care.
Get rid of the middle man.
Get government out of the equation.
With those two the system now breaks down. Government is not the cure, but the problem.
Interesting that you would rather deal with insurance company bureaucrats who profit by denying coverage, than government provided health insurance that is more efficient and cost-effective.
Anyone here ever have a chronic illness? If you have, you will probably have some familiarity with your insurance company’s “Cost Minimization Department”. This is where cases are assigned to minimize the payments made to people with chronic illnesses, by denying every claim that they possibly can.
Most primary care physicians in the US favor universal coverage, because they spend an inordinate amount of their time dealing with insurance companies, trying to get them to cover the tests and treatments that their patients need.
In the US, we spend more on health care per capita than every other developed country, and our medical outcomes are no better, and in many cases, worse.
Anonymous cut-and-paste talking points – *Pfft!*!
Since when has any “Government Provided Anything,” be it health insurance or the DMV, ever been more efficient let alone cost-effective? And beyond that, when “cost-effective” does seem to matter so much, WHY do it with people’s actual lives in the balance? It’s sophomoric Utopian lotus-eating belief-system – faith in ~Govenment~ – are you nuts??
This whole thing has NOTHING to do with “Health Care” – not that the Government can possibly run that right or even half-right.
The Government is only expert at the creation of huge, finger-pointing not-my-job Bureaucracies that employ huge amounts of government-voting government-workers, so huge they have their own UNION. The Govt. has not nor has it ever shown to be good at managing anybody’s health. Death yes, the Government does Warfare pretty well.
Most primary care physicians do NOT favor universal coverage, because it means they have to deal with all the Medicare crap, all the fraud and the layers and layers of ridiculous paperwork that restrict their costs by Government Fiat, and constricts their ability to deliver actual health care.
And we spend more on health care (or is it Education? – Which is a better strawman?) because we INVENT the new treatments and new means of caring for desperate conditions, and the drugs – while the other countries free-ride on our coattails. And we have a higher success-rate. All that innovation would be lost under a *Government Managed* health system where cost-containment is first and foremost – because the decay to containment is the inevitable first step that such bureaucratic systems always take – like it has in Britain.
Let me put this as delicately as possible, FUCK La Raza, FUCK Obama and FUCK every son of a bitch that supports him and La Raza…
To ARMS America, To ARMS…
It bothers me that the media is focusing on Sotomayor’s ethnic background so Goddamned much. She is an American who happens to be Hispanic. So be it.
Instead of folks supporting her based upon her judicial decisions, there is automatic solidiarity among certain folks because she is an ethnic minority. I have also seen some people rally against her because she is Hispanic.
I say they ought to stop focusing on race and that crap and look at the choices she’s made, the decisions she’s authored. Screw any other consideration because the most important thing is how does she follow the Constitution.
I make no claim that government health care programs are a model of efficiency. But they are much more efficient than their private counterparts in the US. It is a complete fallacy to assume that private industry is inherently more efficient. Anyone who has worked for a private corporation can tell you that is not the case. It’s important to keep in mind that there isn’t much direct competition among health insurance companies. Many of them are essentially monopolies.
There is generally little pressure on such corporations to be efficient, so long as their profits stay high. It’s only when profits are challenged that there is pressure for more efficient processes and business practices. Downsizing and lay-offs usually come first, because they are more easily achieved.
Any objective analysis will tell you that the VA and Medicare are relatively well-run, with much lower overhead than for-profit providers and insurers. They have constant pressure to contain costs, because their budgets are more limited. Similarly, government run health care in other countries spend much less and provide as good, or better care. Just talk to a sampling of real Canadians sometime. Not right wingers spouting made up statistics about long wait times and other horror stories, but real Canadians. I have, and I have heard no serious complaints. On the other hand, I hear horror stories about health care in the US all the time. All the time.
It is true that the US has been a leader in medical technology, pharmaceuticals and so on. But we have been steadily losing ground to other countries for years.
A major problem is that many fancy new drugs and techniques are designed to make a profit, and not to cure new diseases or to obtain better medical outcomes. The pharmaceutical industry devotes a disproportionate amount of their research budgets on extensions of current profitable product lines (defense against market erosion to less expensive generics), rather than on development of more effective drugs, or drugs for new indications. The profit motive is actually an undermining factor here, as corporate research funds get spent on projects that will be profitable, as opposed to those that are actually beneficial (Longer eye-lashes anyone? Need your wrinkles filled?).
No matter how cynical you may be about government, in this situation the government is the only real hope. The private sector has too much control right now, and unless they are constrained to act differently they will keep maximizing their profits, at everyone else’s expense.
Anon-e-moose: yeah, that Canadian healthcare, what a fabulous thing. And that UK healthcare as well; equally fabulous. Huh. Wonder why there’s so damned many American hospitals and health clinics so close to the Canadian border.
BZ
Ha! That worm is the best description of a Republican Senator I’ve seen yet. Good one. It’s sad when we can diss our own senators just as much as the democrat senators.
SIGNED! Thanks, bz
The Government is the only hope? Spoken like a true statist. The “Private Sector,” the sector that creates revenue because Government only takes revenue, is regulated to within an inch of its life and is quickly being suffocated by the Government parasite. The same parasite that has crashed the economy and is driving business away.
Anonymous – I have a long list of chronic health problems.
I would prefer that government have no role in health care at all and stopped subsidizing it and got the hell out of my life.
Once we take our health care seriously by having to pay for it when we need it looked after and DON’T have to go through ANY bureaucrats, then we will get BETTER health care because we will take care of ourselves and not expect someone else to pay for it.
Yeah, I gots chronic, long-term health problems.
Wanna make something of it?
I want to survive, and as I have been a government bureaucrat I do know that the last people I ever want involved in deciding my health care are government bureaucrats. And YES I have been treated by NIH. I like the people there. They are very good in very limited venues. When THEY couldn’t figure out my problem I knew I was on my own… and it took five months and batteries of tests to finally find one of my chronic problems when it hit me in 2005. That was about #4 or 5 by then… you got a problem with that?
Mind you the EXPERTS at NIH couldn’t figure it out, the ‘very best’ in the business… but by working with my private physicians and painstakingly going through batteries of tests I survived the process of elimination and got to an answer. Ever walk into a blood sampling room and see 25 vials waiting to be filled?
How about once a week for a month?
I can imagine what it would be like filling out government forms for each and every one of those… because that is the nature of government.
I want to survive, thanks.
You wishing government health care on me is a serious, active THREAT to me, and I know it.
And, yes, I’ve researched the topic, all the way back to the 1920’s. I do not like the way government has been ‘helping’ in health care as it has raised costs, restricted medications, and made the entire affair more expensive via subsidies in the tax code and the tragedy of the commons for VA and Medicaire. If you can’t fix VA and Medicaire, then you cannot ‘fix’ health care… and if government can’t ‘fix’ the problem it should hand it back to the American people to do as States and individuals.
My Uncle Edward lived through the Spanish Influenza epidemic and had the perfect measuring stick for any ‘problem’ – he would look out the window then look back and say: ‘It can’t be that bad. No dead bodies in the street.’ By that measuring stick we have no crisis at all in anything… and that tells me just what the people backing the ‘crisis’ language want: power.