Obama on single-payer health care...

[Oli]

what bothers me most is that some of you want the goverment, the same people who have fucked up every social program there is, run our healthcare. lets see, social security will be bankrupt soon, so that tax will be raised, our public schools dont teach, but teachers, at least where i live are doing awfully well. welfare, medicare, workmans comp are all filled up with corruption and fraud with no accountability. every single one of these programs have turned into a huge beaurocrisy that we have to pay for. sure lets put the politicians in charge of this one too. thats why they dont pay into social security, because they have thier own tax payer funded retirement that makes them millionaires when they retire. they have thier own taxpayer funded healthcare that not 1 dime comes out thier pockets. yup, these are the guys i want to control my life. hey, why get a job and succeed when the goverment will provide all the basics needs of life? why not run for public office and get these perks yourself? or is that to much work? why are the insurance companies making such profits? i'll tell you why, because the politicians you want to run the healthcare system are being paid not to change it. my advice to you is to take care of yourself. or are you to stupid or lazy to do it?

Blah blah blah, big government, blah blah blah, don't try anything new, even when there is a problem, blah blah blah

Go back to jerking off in GA

[SarahG]

Go back to jerking off in GA

Jerking off? That doesn't fit in with abstinence only education (anyone remember Jocelyn Elder?).

[El Nino]

Nice Dave

[Oli]

Jerking off? That doesn't fit in with abstinence only education (anyone remember Jocelyn Elder?).

Or our recently departed President's administration.

[hippifried]

Only the working class would have seen 8th grade as "educated" even back then. Just because your father didn't finish high school doesn't mean that is characteristic of America's professional-class of the time.

The middle class had embraced secondary education long before the 30s-40s, and certainly were graduating above the 8th grade. In fact by the mid 30s Richmond begun an experiment aimed at tweaking public education programs & durations, randomly split their schools up so that some students went through a modern K-12 program, some went through an accelerated 1-11 program and at the end both groups were tested to see how graduates compared. The drop out rates, and standardized test findings both showed that the two programs produced essentially equivalent groups of students... a program that would have been laughable if "8th grade was sufficient".

You still don't know what you're talking about. My dad didn't go to high school because there weren't any. College preparatory academies were few & far between, only in the cities or near the colleges, & private.

What professional class? You're talking about the sliver of people who went to college. We were an agrarian society & economy until WWII. We would probably have pulled out of the depression years earlier if not for the dust bowl. What we would consider middle class was a small part of the population, & most of it got wiped out by the depression. Expanded secondary education was part of the New Deal stimulous to build schools & keep teenagers out of the job market if possible. The depression & war industrialization brought on the mass flight to the cities. High school was elective & still is for the most part. You have more dropouts because you have more people starting in the first place. It's expected. It didn't used to be. What you see as the norm was built up in the post war boom of the late '40s, '50s, '60s, & early '70s.

America used to dominate technical and scientific fields, graduated more scientists and engineers than any other country. Today we have to import them from other countries because we simply don't have the graduates to fill our domestic needs.

Actually, we still dominate technology, & we've always imported brain power to do it. So what?

How could anyone consider a district with a 75% drop out rate to be anything BUT a failure?

& that would be where? You try to make it seem like the norm. I'm not a blog-rube.

Before you say I don't know what I am talking about, you really should go read some history books and see the history of our grid.

The grid is nationalized the same way the rails are, or the cross-country phone lines & pipelines. It's all regulated & built under eminent domain, but still in private hands.

I never said it was nationalized. I said it was socialized (surely you know the difference?).

Yeah whatever. All schools are socialized & always have been. That's the structure. The only education that isn't socialized is private tutoring, & a case can be made that that's socialized for the most part too. Got a point? By the way, red-baiting doesn't work.

The VA has its own hospital system. Not to be confused with the military hospital system. Both have their problems, but neither has any relation whatsoever to a universal single payer plan. You're comparing apples & oranges. Nobody's talking about a takeover of the healthcare system. Just the financial system. That's where the problem lies. The clinics & outpatient facilities will happen because that's what'll get paid for. That'll empty the waiting rooms at the ERs & make them manageable, without the 10 to 12 hour waits. When you have full access to the books of the providers & the accounting expertise, you can affect the market price. Free the providers from the insurance chaos & they'll streamline. It doesn't even take the insurance companies out of the picture entirely. It just creates a buffer & eliminates the ability to pay caveat. Private insurance companies are already working with medicare, & it seems to work fine. A few bumps here & there, but it certainly simplifies things for the patient.

Healthcare shouldn't be tied to a job. The only reason we have that in place is because all this started with union contracts & trust fund accounts that farmed out the details to those with expertise. It wasn't perfect but it worked. It's too limited. We can do better, make it more inclusive, & cheaper in the long run. Free the employer from sole burdon of coverage, & you make them immediately more competitive with companies from countries around the world who have already dealt with this problem. Wage raises & personnel increases are easier to absorb also. There's no downside to doing this.

[trish]

You have to be able to walk before you can run, and the feds simple refuse to, in practice, commit themselves to the few things that they have socialized.

Sure, we can blame the politicians all we want for "ruining programs" but, those politicians are in office for a reason... they're who we keep electing into offices.

Forgive me for quoting from two distinct posts, SarahG. But on these points we agree. The problem lies not entirely with the commitment of politicians, but with our own commitment. If people are committed to public education, they need to elect officials who won’t sabotage public education with unfunded mandates and idiotic testing schemes. They need to elect people who won’t cut education at the first sign of a budget crunch. Public education works when people are dedicated to it. The same is true of social security, government health care etc. All we have to do is decide what we want and commit ourselves to it.

This realization establishes a basic asymmetry between public and private. Without oversight or regulation, no amount of public commitment will improve private insurance, or private education. Short term cost effective strategies will always trump strategies that are long term and more costly on the short run. That’s why insurance companies are willing to pay for prosthetic limbs but not for the care that would have prevented the diabetes that killed the limb in the first place.

[addicted]

Obama is like a fighter that has taken a dive. He has givien into all the demands from corrupt healthcare titans that financed his campaign which is the biggest con job in american history.

[dave252]

what bothers me most is that some of you want the goverment, the same people who have fucked up every social program there is, run our healthcare. lets see, social security will be bankrupt soon, so that tax will be raised, our public schools dont teach, but teachers, at least where i live are doing awfully well. welfare, medicare, workmans comp are all filled up with corruption and fraud with no accountability. every single one of these programs have turned into a huge beaurocrisy that we have to pay for. sure lets put the politicians in charge of this one too. thats why they dont pay into social security, because they have thier own tax payer funded retirement that makes them millionaires when they retire. they have thier own taxpayer funded healthcare that not 1 dime comes out thier pockets. yup, these are the guys i want to control my life. hey, why get a job and succeed when the goverment will provide all the basics needs of life? why not run for public office and get these perks yourself? or is that to much work? why are the insurance companies making such profits? i'll tell you why, because the politicians you want to run the healthcare system are being paid not to change it. my advice to you is to take care of yourself. or are you to stupid or lazy to do it?

Blah blah blah, big government, blah blah blah, don't try anything new, even when there is a problem, blah blah blah

Go back to jerking off in GA

HOWS THIS FOR TRYING SOMETHING NEW! How about making our healthcare premiums tax deductable? how about giving tax break incentives to the insurance companies to give lower income people lower rates? How about giving doctors a tax break to treat uninsured people at minimal or no cost? there maybe better alternatives than giving those a-holes in washington more control over our lives. do any of you really believe that if washington took control of healthcare that your taxes wouldnt go up? think about it, they would have to make a whole new dept of healthcare, overstaff it, pay all these federal employees a salary then pay the doctor and hospital bills. you may not like the current situation, but i would bet my life that in the end you would pay more taxes that your premiums are now. maybe its just my lack of trust in our goverment officials who have done nothing but make themselves and thier cronies rich.

[hippifried]

Tax tweaks aren't going to fix anything. It only affects the higher brackets & doesn't expand the pool.

[dave252]

Tax tweaks aren't going to fix anything. It only affects the higher brackets & doesn't expand the pool.

if you make it affordable, it does expand the pool. when computers first came on the market, the prices were out of reach for the common man, when they became reasonable, did the POOL expand? When dvd players first came out, they were expensive, now you can walk into walmart and buy one for 39 bucks, everyone has a dvd player, the pool expanded! hd tvs, the same thing. so if you have incentives to make healthcare insurance affordable the pool will expand.