has the citizen's united ruling backfired on republcans

Don't lump Cruz and Perry. Cruz is as smart as they come while Perry can barely graduate for ATM. I know several people that worked with when he was the solicitor general and they all say his intellect is off the charts even if they don't agree with him. I don't think Cruz will win the presidency but he will be around for a while. Think of him as a really smart Delay/Ron Paul.

 

I'm on all of Cruz's mailing lists and have not received a single solicitation for money.

 

That's why I said he is "smart in away" meaning IQ. His EQ and judgement seems pretty low. Some of the stuff he has said sounds just moronic for an intelligent man. Maybe he is just playing for the yahoos. Who knows? He is also unlikeable which is important for a national politician.

I agree he will be around especially since he is so useful for the corporate elite.

 

He doesn't need little guys money, just their votes.

 

so where is your evidence that he's raising a bunch of money (not that it would be bad if he were)?

 

Ted Cruz’s Fake Fight Against Obamacare Is Making Millions

Some People Are Making Big Bucks Sabotaging Obamacare

Ted Cruz’s excellent fundraising adventure

 

Clowns are always the most popular act at the circus.

And (I think this is the third time I've said it this week) while the ultra-right clowns distract us, the money can move the Democratic party to the right. The ACA was a republican program; it will make billions for the Health Insurance Industry when we could have done the same thing with a non-profit Federal Single Payer program. How do you think that happened?

The clowns were jumping up and down screaming socialism, socialism while the money said, hey how about this as a compromise, we will make money and we will give some to you.

 

"A single payer system is not politically viable at this point"

Why? because there is too much profit in the status quo, the healthcare industry lobbyist own Congress. Negotiating drug prices in Medicare could save up to $50 billion year after year without compromising care, according to economist Dean Baker. That equates to almost 60 percent of the entire sequester now in place.

http://www.cepr.net/documents/efficient_medicare_2006_01.pdf

 

Not necessarily. The health care industry is about 20% of the US economy or something absurd like that. You can't change how that much of the economy works without causing all sorts of hell to break loose. You'd create a recession, cause all sorts of unemployment from just erasing the insurance industry, etc. You'd also create incredible investment uncertainty - do you buy out the insurance companies? Just shut them down and zero out the owners? What does that do to the tens or hundreds of billions lost overnight - much of it in pension funds, retirement accounts, etc? What happens to the entire medical industry that was built around a certain economic structure?

You can move in that direction over time, certainly, but any transition would take decades to pull off at best. You can't just disrupt that large a sector of the economy without mass chaos.

 

And even it it did happen, it isn't a bad thing. That way all bases are covered. :grin:

 

The insurance companies are too big to fail, so they can continue to screw us all.

 

Insurers aren't really the problem here - they are required to spend something like 80-85% of our premiums on health expenditures - the other 15-20% covers administration, wages, profit, etc. So they can't really screw everyone over. The problem is deeper in - costs of the actual procedures are going up. Insurance pools the money and distributes it, but it's not the underlying cause of the problem.

 

Well there are different kinds of insurance. And the requirement about how much they spend on our health care premiums is only recent. Insurance still screws doctors over with the cost of mal practice insurance etc. But also the reason why the costs of procedures go up is because the people know that they are charging insurance companies and not actual families or individuals.