posted
That's crazy! Youre saying belief in supply side economics is based on the personal interests of oh my GOD!
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Of course, because so many people are arguing about it, and some of the people arguing about it don't really care whether or not what they're saying is true, there are a lot of things people think the bill does that just aren't true. Here's a few of them:
Obamacare has death panels!: That sounds so cartoonishly evil it must be true, right? Well, no. No part of the bill says anything about appointing people to decide whether or not someone dies. The decision over whether or not your claim is approved is still in the hands of your insurer. However, now there's an appeals process so if your claim gets turned down, you can challenge that. And the government watches that appeals process to make sure it's not being unfair to customers. So if anything the PPACA is trying to stop the death panels. ( Citation: Page 23, sec. 2719 )
What about the Independent Medical Advisory Board? Death Panels!: The Independent Medical Advisory Board is intended to give recommendations on how to save Medicare costs per person, deliver more efficient and effective care, improve access to services, and eliminate waste. However, they have no real power. They put together a recommendation to put before Congress, and Congress votes on it, and the President has power to veto it. What's more, they are specifically told that their recommendation will not ration health care, raise premiums or co-pays, restrict benefits, or restrict eligibility. In other words, they need to find ways to save money without reducing care for patients. So no death panels. In any sense of the (stupid) term. ( Citation: Page 407, sec. 3403 )
Obamacare gives free insurance to illegal immigrants!: Actually, there are multiple parts of the bill that specifically state that the recipient of tax credits and other good stuff must be a legal resident of the United States. And while the bill doesn't specifically forbid illegals from buying insurance or getting treated at hospitals, neither did the laws in the US before the PPACA. So even at worst, illegals still have just as much trouble getting medical care as they used to. ( Citations: Page 122, sec. 1402, Page 123, sec. 1411, Page 125, sec. 1411, Page 132, sec. 1412 )
Obamacare uses taxpayer money for abortions!: One part of the bill says, essentially, that the folks who wrote this bill aren't touching that issue with a ten foot pole. It basically passes the buck on to the states, who can choose to allow insurance plans that cover abortions, or they can choose to not allow them. Obama may be pro-choice, but that is not reflected in the PPACA. ( Citation: Page 64, sec. 1303 )
Obamacare won't let me keep the insurance I have!: The PPACA actually very specifically says you can keep the insurance you have if you want. ( Citation: Page 55, sec. 1251 )
Obamacare will make the government get between me and my doctor!: The PPACA very specifically says that the Secretary of Health and Human Services (who is in charge of much of the bill), is absolutely not to promote any regulation that hinders a patient's ability to get health care, to speak with their doctor, or have access to a full range of treatment options. ( Citation: Page 165, sec. 1554 )
Obamacare has a public option! That makes it bad!: The public option (which would give people the option of getting insurance from a government-run insurer, thus the name), whether you like it or not, was taken out of the bill before it was passed. You can still see where it used to be, though. ( Citation: Page 92, sec. 1323 (the first one) )
Obamacare will cost trillions and put us in massive debt!: The PPACA will cost a lot of money... at first. $1.7 Trillion. Yikes, right? But that's just to get the ball rolling. You see, amongst the things built into the bill are new taxes - on insurers, pharmaceutical companies, tanning salons, and a slight increase in taxes on people who make over $200K (an increase of less than 1%). Additionally, the bill cuts some stuff from Medicare that's not really working, and generally tries to make everything work more efficiently. Also, the increased focus on preventative care (making sure people don't get sick in the first place), should help to save money the government already spends on emergency care for these same people. Basically, by catching illnesses early, we're not spending as much on emergency room visits. According to the Congressional Budget Office, who studies these things, the ultimate result is that this bill will reduce the yearly deficit by $210 billion. By the year 2021, the bill will actually have paid itself and started bringing in more money than it cost.
Obamacare is twice as long as War and Peace!: War and Peace is 587,287 words long. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, depending on which version you're referring to, is between 300,000-400,000 words long. Don't get me wrong, it's still very long, but it's not as long as War and Peace. Also, it bears mention that bills are often long. In 2005, Republicans passed the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, 2005, which was almost as long as the PPACA, and no one raised a stink about it.
The people who passed Obamacare didn't even read it!: Are you kidding? They had been reading it over and over for a half a year. This thing was being tossed around in debates for ages. And it went through numerous revisions, but every time it was revised, it was just adding, removing, or changing small parts of it, not rewriting the whole thing. And every time it was revised, the new version of the bill was published online for everyone to see. The final time it was edited, there may not have been time to re-read the entire thing before voting on it, but there wasn't a need to, because everyone had already read it all. The only thing people needed to read was the revision, which there was plenty of time to do.
Pelosi said something like, "we'll have to pass the bill before reading it"!: The actual quote is "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy", and she's talking about all the lies and false rumors that were spreading about it. Things had gotten so absurd that by this point many had given up on trying to have an honest dialogue about it, since people kept worrying about things that had no basis in reality. Pelosi was simply trying to say that once the bill is finalized and passed, then everyone can look at it and see, without question, what is actually in the thing (as opposed to some new amendment you heard on the radio that they were going to put in).
I think those are some of the bigger ones. I'll try to get to more as I think of them.
OH and apparently also the Mississippi Tea Party is now advocating insurrection over the bill not being struck down by the SCOTUS.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: Hands up, people who want to keep Mississippi in the union?
I think I want it vaguely more than I want Mississippi as a decrepit, poverty-stricken, tea-party Wunderland sharing our borders and deregulating its industry to the point where everywhere around it gets its meth output and blue clouds of coalsmoke
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:I think I want it vaguely more than I want Mississippi as a decrepit, poverty-stricken, tea-party Wunderland sharing our borders and deregulating its industry to the point where everywhere around it gets its meth output and blue clouds of coalsmoke.
Does keeping it in the Union mean this doesn't happen?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
| IP: Logged |
quote:I think I want it vaguely more than I want Mississippi as a decrepit, poverty-stricken, tea-party Wunderland sharing our borders and deregulating its industry to the point where everywhere around it gets its meth output and blue clouds of coalsmoke.
Does keeping it in the Union mean this doesn't happen?
Plus they get Senators and Congresspeople and electoral college votes that can screw things up for the rest of us.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
If Mississippi left, then people from Mississippi would not be American Citizens. They could not hold down jobs in neighboring states such as Alabama.
Wait...
How would Alabama's strict illegal alien laws work if you couldn't tell the illegal aliens from the real American's by their skin color?
Everyone would need to have their papers on them at all times.
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Feb 2003
| IP: Logged |
quote:I think I want it vaguely more than I want Mississippi as a decrepit, poverty-stricken, tea-party Wunderland sharing our borders and deregulating its industry to the point where everywhere around it gets its meth output and blue clouds of coalsmoke.
Does keeping it in the Union mean this doesn't happen?
To enough of an extent that it doesn't start looking like a new northern mexico
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
I wish I could believe Mitt Romney would be like Teddy Roosevelt in that he surprised everybody with how diametrically opposed his campaign rhetoric was with policy as president. But I'm not taking that risk. I certainly don't believe his personal beliefs mirror what he's currently saying but that just means I know less about him not more.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
| IP: Logged |
He is saying that the individual mandate is "the ultimate conservatism." Direct quote.
quote:
Romney:
"When they show up at the hospital, they get care, they get free care, paid for by you and me. If that's not a form of socialism, I don't know what is. So my plan did something quite different. It said, you know what, if people can afford to buy insurance, if they can afford to buy insurance, or if they can pay their own way, then they either buy that insurance or pay their own way, but they no longer look to government to hand out free care. And that, in my opinion, is ultimate conservatism. That's why the Heritage Foundation worked with us and was at the celebration of the signing. The Heritage Foundation, as you know, a quintessentially conservative group, recognized that the principles of free enterprise and personal responsibility were at work."
At least he had indeed correctly tagged the fact that it is indeed socialism of a sort to not literally leave someone outside the hospital to die if they cannot pay for emergency care.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
| IP: Logged |
Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
Argument I've found made by Embittered Old People and Nihilist Synchophants:
quote: Legally, the big Federal stick over the states - ability to pull existing funding to make the states bend to their will - is gone. Kaput. Verboten. You may condition new money, but you cannot put new stings on existing money to force the states to do as you wish. With a 7-2 majority, the states now have carte blanche from the liberal wing to tell the Feds to shove it if the Feds do something they don't like. The Tenth Amendment reached up and just ripped the heart out of Big Government right there.
This "gold trim on the flag" levels of bs where the Federal gov't is just going to say "lol no."?
IP: Logged |
quote:According to the Post, the coverup began as early as last February, “when Duval County Health Department officials felt so overwhelmed by the sudden spike in tuberculosis that they asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to become involved. Believing the outbreak affected only their underclass, the health officials made a conscious decision not to not tell the public, repeating a decision they had made in 2008, when the same strain had appeared in an assisted living home for people with schizophrenia.”
That decision now appears to have gone terribly awry, partly because the disease appears to have already spread into the general population but also because just nine days before the CDC warning was issued, Florida Governor Rick Scott had signed a bill downsizing the state’s Department of Health and closing the A.G. Holley State Hospital that had treated the most difficult tuberculosis cases for over 60 years.
we are so dysfunctional at health care, we are really trying to turn ourselves into a russia or india, where itinerant and homeless populations turn into unchecked breeding grounds for drug resistant TB because our system is so averse to proactive coverage.
solution: hide it, they're just homeless people, plus let's close this hospital we need now more than ever hurrr
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
And we still have to listen to American politicians crow about American Exceptionalism every day and excoriate each other for flag pin faux pas.
How the rest of the world keeps a straight face when they talk about us is beyond me.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: I HATE TO BELABOR THE POINT (well maybe I dont) but good lord people, this is exactly the sort of thing we need to pay attention to.
quote:According to the Post, the coverup began as early as last February, “when Duval County Health Department officials felt so overwhelmed by the sudden spike in tuberculosis that they asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to become involved. Believing the outbreak affected only their underclass, the health officials made a conscious decision not to not tell the public, repeating a decision they had made in 2008, when the same strain had appeared in an assisted living home for people with schizophrenia.”
That decision now appears to have gone terribly awry, partly because the disease appears to have already spread into the general population but also because just nine days before the CDC warning was issued, Florida Governor Rick Scott had signed a bill downsizing the state’s Department of Health and closing the A.G. Holley State Hospital that had treated the most difficult tuberculosis cases for over 60 years.
we are so dysfunctional at health care, we are really trying to turn ourselves into a russia or india, where itinerant and homeless populations turn into unchecked breeding grounds for drug resistant TB because our system is so averse to proactive coverage.
solution: hide it, they're just homeless people, plus let's close this hospital we need now more than ever hurrr
So wait... The CDC along with other health officials decide not to tell the people, but hey, let's blame it on a bill Rick Scott passed! How does that even make sense?
Health officials and the CDC decide not to tell people about an outbreak, more people get infected. Damn, I'm so happy we are giving more power over the health care system to them!
Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
Germaine, reading the article it is clear the CDC did not decide to tell people. They tried several times to get the word out. It was the state level health department officials who decided to keep it quiet.
We are not blaming Rick Scott for trying to keep it quiet. We are blaming him for cutting back the state health care funding to the point that the state officials felt the need to keep it quiet, and were able to do so to save money.
Posts: 1941 | Registered: Feb 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Based on the article it actually looks like Gov. Scott had no clue what was happening. It was more a result of his terrible policies than an intentional cover-up.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
As is often the case. Culpability is often unsatisfyingly allocated to the policy level. These types of things are rarely the result of discrete, individual choices, but overall approaches that carry these as consequences.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
Scott isn't the only Rick out there saying he won't implement Obamacare.
quote:Asked Monday about a new report by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which ranked Texas dead last in terms of delivering health services, Perry forcefully hit back against the new study.
So is there a direct correlation between states with terrible health care and refusal to upgrade quality of service, or is it just a coincidence?
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
I would say its abut as coincidental as states that refuse to teach contraception and family planning having high rates of stds and illegitimacy.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Darth_Mauve: Welcome to Survival of the Richest
Sorry, richie rich, if we sit back and let the poor breed new strains of tuberculosis out of sheer incompetent neglect of our dysfunctional systems and its perverse incentives, y'all gonna get consumption too
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: So is there a direct correlation between states with terrible health care and refusal to upgrade quality of service, or is it just a coincidence?
The selfsame slavish adherence to the very programs and ideologies which have left their healthcare systems in absolute, godawful shambles are all very well associated with loathing obama
(and, just for fun, you can note they tend to be net federal dollar consumers rather than producers, too.)
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:So wait... The CDC along with other health officials decide not to tell the people, but hey, let's blame it on a bill Rick Scott passed! How does that even make sense?
Health officials and the CDC decide not to tell people about an outbreak, more people get infected. Damn, I'm so happy we are giving more power over the health care system to them!
According to the story, the disease had *already* spread, so the decision to downsize hospital space would've been a bad one regardless. Furthermore, the initial county health officials who turned to the CDC said they felt overwhelmed...I wonder why that was? Lack of staff, funding, resources perhaps?
Who is one of the leading figures in the state behind cutting services, Geraine? Do you think that might have had *some* impact on this matter? Is there *any* failure in our civic infrastructure for which the immediate answer isn't 'strangle their funding off to kill it'? Because if your solution to every problem is the same, chances are it's not that all the problems have the same solution.
*TB* outbreaks in the 21st century United States among the most poor and desperate. Is not even THAT a situation in which we say 'ok, government can do some good here'. Isn't something like taking steps to mitigate the outbreak of dangerous diseases when they flare up one of those fundamental, universally agreed purposes of government?
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: [QUOTE] Isn't something like taking steps to mitigate the outbreak of dangerous diseases when they flare up one of those fundamental, universally agreed purposes of government?
... No?
Wait wait! I can get this one.... No? AWW CRAP.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Because eventually even the thickest partisan hack realizes his party is just blatantly ****ing him about for money. And these weren't even the thickest of partisans. The republicans have gotten bad enough, I think, that a fair few of their base have cooled on them- possibly for good.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
They'll still vote for what they perceive to be the lesser of two evils out of tribalism.
IP: Logged |
posted
Meh. I'm not terribly worried about any of that. You can't really change the tide of history, and right now American conservatism is so far on the wrong side of the tide, it may nt recover in anything like the present form.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
I really am interested in the question of why what appears to be (but that's simply my opinion) a reflexive irritation with this situation leads to 'we need to give them less power, less ability, less resources-this would be better if they were smaller'. That is what Geraine appeared to me to be getting at, but it's quite possible I'm wrong-I'm operating from a position of irritation too.
Related to the topic, 'small government' just seems to be such a double-standard. Social services, taxation, infrastructure, regulation-it appears to me more often than not the answer either starts with or includes 'it would all be better if it were gone or smaller'. They cannot be trusted-they'll be either inefficient or wicked in their use of what power we give them.
But then if we mosey on down to military, law enforcement, a few key social and religious issues, and intelligence services...we mustn't pry. They know what they're doing. Trust the leaders on the ground. We're a Christian nation. Ticking time bomb.
If we cannot be trusting government to effectively manage something as straightforward as infrastructure, why in heaven are we to then say government needs to legislate which adults can sleep with which, and we need to trust our generals with power over life and death of our soldiers and others and trillions of dollars?
I can certainly see why Geraine wouldn't want to talk about that here-not exactly a friendly audience, or even a neutral one. But this contradiction seems very real to me, and it's both troubling and interesting
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Rakeesh, it all hinges on a few popular fallacies. The first is basically a post hoc ergo proper hoc error that attributes perceived failures of modern institutions and governments to the existance of these institutions, rather than to the actual causes: namely industrialization.
It is no accident, for example, that American conservatism had its bastion in the industrializing North and West where the most people in power stood to gain from unregulated industry in the 19th and early 20th centuries, before these areas became socially egalitarin, and education the middle class smoothed the playing field Whereas, conservatism finds its modern roots in the south, where the same thing is happening again- a few stand to benefit from weak regulation and poor infrastructure, while the populous is socially immobile and poorly educated.
So the fallacy that gets sold to poor and uneducated people is that the government that arose to regulate the forces bringing such imbalance into their lives was in fact the source of the imbalance. To someone who has a poorly informed picture of how national or even state government operates, the functioning of national institutions, especially social institutions, can easily be made to appear perverse. And while the forces of conservatism labor to retard and dismantle these systems, their actual utility becomes legitimately questionable. Whereas, with certain other systems, such as defense, intelligence, and etc, the same fallacy applies in a reciprocal fashion: American might and American Exceptionalism, actually based on the industrialization of America and the strength of social institutions, is credited entirely to military strength--- strength which was actually developed of necessity to defend the borders of a trading empire that was not won by conquest at all, but by trade competitiveness. (this is not to say our military might doesn't ensure ascendancy, but it wasn't developed *in order to conquer*. It was built to protect gains made in other ways).
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
