By: lazaruslong
Oh wait. I get it. You are using the classic Republican strategy. You reconcile this: oh, I don’t know. The argument can be made that there are simply too many people taking up valuable space in this country. People with no wealth or wealth-producing skills are a form of surplus, no? Half this country can’t find their ass with both hands. Why should the productive members of society be forced at gunpoint to help them? That’s not freedom, and not what this great country was founded for. Reagan’s recorded speech in 1961 for the AMA’s Operation Coffee Cup lays it out best. With this: I’m all for single-payer, mandatory-enrollment, subsidized-for-all government health system by saying “The argument could be made”. Like “mistakes were made”. Or “to the best of my knowledge”. If you are going to derail with trollish comments, at least stick to your guns.
By: Justinian
nax: single payer isn’t even on the table right now. At this point we just need to hope for a public option; we’re not supposed to say so but the Republicans are correct that a robust public option is a stalking horse for single payer. Yeah, yeah the Democrats will deny that until their last breath. They have to for political reasons. We know it is. The Republicans know it is. They know that we know. It’s a necessary bit of kabuki theater. But Baucus is going to gut the public option and replace it with some bullshit “co-op” system which won’t do squat. And the Democrats will declare victory and pass it with a bunch of fanfare. And Obama will declare victory and sign it with a bunch of fanfare. Did I mention it will include an individual mandate to buy insurance? So the Democrats and Obama will screw us all over just so they can pass something and declare victory even if it makes everything even worse. Which it will. An individual mandate with no public option is a complete and total betrayal of the people that voted the administration into office. Don’t let them fool you into believing otherwise. But the truth is that health care reform has been doomed from the start given that Max Baucus is chairman of the Finance Committee. No decent legislation of any sort (and I’m not limiting this to health care reform) will ever pass the Senate as long as we have that tin pot bastard in charge. Baucus is bought and paid for.
By: @troy
when doctors are turning away welfare recipients? By welfare I meant Medicare/Medicaid means-tested style welfare that Reagan and his AMA backers grudgingly allow, not welfare for the able-bodied. Those that pass the means test, ie the poor, have fuck-all power in this country, of course, so having some half-assed welfare assistance for medical services is not threatening to the Conservative Agenda of keeping gummint out of their private [economical] affairs. Plus of course if the indigent have a life-threatening condition they can get treated in the ER. I tried to make sense of Ron Paul’s recent interview and couldn’t find any traction, other than gummint spending bad, freedom good. To clarify all that, I think Conservatives don’t mind mainstreaming SOME charity cases into the private system, but they don’t want to see the entire system turn into a “government program” on the model of the NHS of the UK, or the halfway-house that is single-payer up in Canada. Or France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Finland, or Japan’s system. We ‘mericans value our freedoms more than they. <— conservative viewpoint attempt
By: pyramid termite
Conservatives don’t want to see this system destroyed by a Democrat patronage system on the order of the Postal Service or DMV. do you even know anyone who works for either? have you ever taken the test to get in the postal service? are you aware that in some states the dmv is ran by republicans? do you realize that this system is well on its way to destroying itself without a democrat patronage system? that’s why millions of people aren’t in it, the premiums keep going up and the benefits keep going down? talking points don’t get it anymore - lose the propaganda and the cant and take a look at what’s going on you’re not a troll - you just don’t have clue one as to what you’re talking about
By: kliuless
fwiw, here’re some articles i’ve come across recently that i thought were interesting re: The politics of healthcare reform…An Interview With Kenneth Arrow - “There are information asymmetries in this story… Insurance companies have high premiums to protect themselves. The ones who come to the insurance company are sicker and the people have to pay more. You have adverse selection. You have moral hazard. And the doctor does what’s on the safe side — defensive medicine — without regard to cost. These are fundamental conditions that make health insurance difficult.” Why I Oppose National Health Care (invokes PCT! badly imo, like see above, and the rebuttals in the comments i think are also nice 
Health Care: The Wyden-Bennett Plan[*] Equity and Efficiency in Health Care Markets A Public Plan A Market for Health Reform Children of the revolution - “Mr Klein exemplifies the generation of young left-leaning policy wonks, journalists and activists who have been formed politically by the reaction against Bush-era conservatism, and for whom the Obama presidency represents the first experience of wielding political power. Like Mr Klein, many of these young progressives are fundamentally moderate, process-oriented wonks who, long before the Obama campaign even began, had accepted that the pragmatic limitations of real-world American politics rule out any utopian, or even first-best, solutions to most public-policy problems. They have happily dedicated themselves to figuring out what kinds of reform are possible within the constraints of corporate and interest-group lobbying, ideological and partisan divisions, and America’s kludgey, creaking 220-year-old machinery of government. “And they’re not the first such set of moderate, worldly-wise liberal policy wonks to arrive in Washington. Towards the end of D.A. Pennebaker’s great documentary of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, ‘The War Room’, the young George Stephanopoulos, then Mr Clinton’s communications coordinator, sits down to give a final pep talk to the rest of the campaign staff on the night before the election. He refers to the ‘haiku’ James Carville wrote on a whiteboard at the beginning of the campaign; the line everyone remembers is ‘It’s the economy, stupid’, but we’ve largely forgotten the other two lines, ‘change vs. more of the same’ and, tellingly, ‘don’t forget health care’…” Charlie Rose: A conversation with Peter Orszag, Director, Office of Management & Budget Doug Elmendorf on the Hot Seat - “the situation changes dramatically when the discussion breaks out into the open as has happened with the very public dispute on this issue between Office of Management and Budget Director (and immediate past CBO Director) Peter Orzag and the current CBO Director Doug Elemendorf…”also btw von linked to a handy health care comparison tool from the Kaiser Family Foundation 
cheers!
By: dortmunder
oh, I don’t know. The argument can be made that there are simply too many people taking up valuable space in this country. People with no wealth or wealth-producing skills are a form of surplus, no? You’re right. They’re called children. How do you feel about abortion?
By: hangashore
[My apologies to @troy for referring to him as a troll, since I'd confused his comment as being his own opinion, and not a speculative representation of that of some health-reform opponents.]
By: homunculus
25 Million Have Insurance, But Not Enough: On Top of 47 Million Americans with No Health Coverage, Underinsured Present a Strong Case for Reform
