Obama Admits Health Care Overhaul May Die in Congress

No healthcare reform?

Cheers, pubtards.

 

Weak Sauce!
If this fails . . . . why should any one vote democrat again?
I mean Serious. . . Their only claim to fame is . . .WE NOT THE REPUBLICANS!

Rocket River

 

Better to attempt to help the country and fail than to attempt to screw the country and succeed.

 

The health care reform bill as it stands is a success if it fails. It needs to be re-written or better, started from scratch, to reform the insurance industry and provide a step-by-step, financially responsible blueprint for universal healthcare for all U.S. citizens without special privileges for specified states or individuals.

This can be done -- not by a radical like Rahm Emanuel -- if moderates from both parties sit down -- in the light of day -- and hammer out a fair, understandable bill. IMO this is something the vast majority of Americans want and need.

In many ways, this legislation is like adding a player to the Rockets. We all want a solid player who can score and defend -- not just a warm body who reaches the extent of his capabilities when he dons a jersey.

 

Outside of the Nelson nonsense (which will be scrapped), what specifically is irresponsible in this bill?

If you want to address universal healthcare and costs, this is the basic bill you're going to end up with. Is there more that can be done? Absolutely. But there's nothing in this bill that's terribly out of whack or that prevents more from being done in the future.

Ultimately, if you want to address costs, you have to get healthy people into the system. If you want to get healthy people into the system, you have to have a mandate. If you have a mandate, you have to have subsidies.

You're absolutely going to have tradeoffs to cut costs - SOMEONE has to lose profits. The health industry is going to have to take more regulation in exchange for the 50MM new customers they get. The hospitals are going to have to lower what they charge in exchange for not having to chase down and write off losses from the uninsured. Pharma will have to cut profit margins in exchange for having more customers. etc.

All of these things were in the bill, and the hospitals, doctors, and pharma all got on board. Insurance fought it because they were going to fight anything - the public option was their main nemesis and they got rid of that.

You keep saying they need something different and this bill was horrible, but what specifically was the problem with the final bill here?

 

Try to do something good for the average american and it will fail, and you get the reputation for being a commie along with it. Start wars in the name of god and democracy against powerful elite army of Iraq, and they build libraries in your name.

Can't Obama just declare the state of our health a national security threat and pass the damn thing?

Uggh, get rid of both parties and bring back the whigs.

 

You're using the word "bully" without any actual reference to bullying.

 

I won't waste my time with the rest of the nonsense you posted, but every CBO scoring of every version of the healthcare bills brought forth from Democrats showed that it would lower costs and reduce the deficit. In fact the CBO shows that the House version would lower the deficit more than any legislation or tax cut in history. The house version would also hit on every other point you made above.

 

Outside of scaring the stuffings out of the American populace as a whole?

As I have said before, I wish I had the expertise. I do know it can't be 2,000+ pages, written in secret, have provisions providing special privileges (union health plans) ... that sort of thing.

If the bill requires uniform and mandatory coverage (no exceptions regardless of income or age) with equal cost per person, there can be no light fines for opting out. The fines must be so onerous that paying for coverage would be the only option. However, with this an elderly person would be screwed and a young family of four or five would be screwed and tattooed.

As much as I hate to admit it, the best solution may be a gradual extension of Medicare -- down to 55 now, down to 45 five years from now, etc. until eventually everybody is covered. Once health care is removed from the equation, I think insurance reform (all aspects) will be doable on a bi-partisan basis.

To fund this, we will have to cut back in a number of areas. Non-citizens will be forced to return to their home countries for treatment unless they are here with a visa, green card or passport. We will have to cut troop deployment in other countries and become more isolationist (military); cut foreign aid, including U.N. contributions (except bare dues); and launch an all-out energy offensive (exploration and drilling for oil and gas to help us with the transition to going totally green via nuclear, windfarming, solar and geothermal energy sources).

In short, health care reform will require a comprehensive, inter-related plan -- a strategic vision that, sadly, I don't think Obama is capable of leading.

 

But that's not the bill - that just the politics. The opposition is always going to try to scare the people no matter what is in the bill because that's how you build opposition.

But here, you're talking about process, not policy. If we're talking about the Senate Bill + scrapping the Nelson thing - which is the most talked about option - then the union health plans isn't in the final bill. Nor is the special exemption for Nebraska. I agree the process was ugly, but if the end result isn't bad, why does it need to be scrapped?

To clarify, I don't think anyone has suggested that everyone get coverage with identical cost. Is that what you believe should happen? There are still tiers of pricing. And in terms of getting buy-in, the fines don't have to be onerous. We've seen that in Massachusetts where they got virtually everyone into the system.

This would address coverage, but it doesn't address the cost curve at all. Medicare is in a death-spiral - not because it's government run or anything like that - but because costs are in a death-spiral for all health care. Simply growing Medicare will save people money but will bankrupt the country just as fast.

This all finds funding, but it doesn't address any of the heart of the problem. GDP grows at 2-3% a year. Health care costs grow at 6-8% per year. That's the heart of what needs to change. If that isn't fixed, the system is headed towards implosion, whether it be 5 years or 10 years or 20 years from now. Your proposals would find more funding in the short term, but it doesn't address the death-spiral that we're in.

The bill in front of us DOES attempt to address the death-spiral - that's why it's so vital. Does it do it completely? Absolutely not. But it does address a lot of things in the cost curve, and it does open up massive amounts of experimentation to find other long term solutions.

 

Major, if a particular bill can't pass, what good is it? It's better to re-write the bill, i.e. put a new face on it, than to see the whole initiative crash in flames. Besides, Blue Dog Democrats will pass health reform if it is moderated and made truly bi-partisan -- not lip-service bi-partisan. I'm just being realistic ... and compromising.

Hmmmm, why does compromise sound so altruistic and compromising so villanous?

 

Agreed, if it can't pass. But it's not clear it can't pass. You seem like you're opposing it because there's lots of opposition - it's a circular argument. But you were opposing months ago when it looked like it could pass too. Ignoring whether it's viable or not, would you support the bill in theory? If not, why not?

The problem is that I haven't seen what "compromise" means here. There are two fundamentally opposite ideas from the Dems and the GOP here on health care reform. You can't really mix the two approaches - you have to pick one or the other as a starting point. Given that the GOP approach has no support of passing given that a majority of Congress opposes it, it makes sense to start from the Dem viewpoint.

From there, there was a lot of moderation. Removal of the public option, for example. Limiting the level of regulations on the industry. etc. The Senate Bill was entirely built on compromise and concessions to the moderates in the party - Lincoln, Bayh, Nelson, Lieberman. It got the support of the moderates and blue dogs in the Senate. It's not a liberal bill at all. It's far more centrist than HillaryCare or even Nixon's Republican health care proposal in the 1970's.

The problem is that the GOP is going to continue to oppose it and call it socialist just because it's not their plan. So the question is whether you just buy into the rhetoric or actually can point to what's wrong with the end result bill that we're looking at.

 

Another way to look at it is that Lincoln, Nelson, etc IS the bipartisanship. They are Democrats, but they are also conservatives. Republicans are opposing this for political reasons, but conservative Democrats were opposing it on policy grounds. When you've gotten them on board, you've addressed the core policy concerns of anyone even remotely open to compromise.

 

First, there really is no bill as yet -- just a Senate version and a House version. I don't think these two can be merged without some really unsavory (IMO) compromises on union and state exemptions as well as on the abortion issue. The language lends itself to abuse (bureaucratic interference between doctor and patient, for example).

In short, the proposed legislation is too long, too complex and too comprehensive to earn my personal support. Again, a step by step approach is best for those of us who prefer to wade into cold water rather than take the "no retreat" plunge.

 

Suspending his campaign mid-summer, and accusing the CIA of ruining his daughter's wedding. Or building billion dollar companies from scratch, mixed bag with that one.

 

What seems clear to me is that the Republicans are protecting their wealthy friends rather than doing what’s right for the country, and I’m sure many of them will be financially rewarded for having done so as well. Can the US even compete with its current antiquated heath care system, a system that wastes $1 trillion per year? I think that’s a very real question. You’re wasting human resources as productivity as well, so the full cost would be much more than $1 trillion per year.

As far as whose fault it is, it sounds like that Massachusetts election was bungled by the Democrats, but in general it’s the voters who give Obama the power to make the changes, so it’s up to Americans to get involved, to talk to people, to vote yourselves, and to get others out to vote. You live in a democracy folks. The people ultimately have the power. If you want Obama to make the changes he wants to make then make sure he has the power to do it.

 

There is a bill, due to the Scott Brown fiasco preventing the Senate from passing another full bill. Pretty much the consensus is passing the Senate bill as-is with a reconciliation measure to kill the Nelson amendment and make some small changes to funding. There is not going to be a merger with the House bill.

As I pointed out earlier, you can't do reform step-by-step unless you're just talking about little things on the margins that have minor impacts but don't actually fix the system. Ultimately, if you want to address costs, you have to get healthy people into the system. If you want to get healthy people into the system, you have to have a mandate. If you have a mandate, you have to have subsidies. They all go together. It's not possible to do it piecemeal - look at any health care expert's opinion on that subject.

There's no such thing as short, non-complex reform of an industry that covers 1/6th of our GDP. It has to be comprehensive or it can't work.

You still can't name a single individual problem with anything in the bill. You've named process. You've listed you didn't like how it was put together, that it's long, etc. But no actual policy issues with the bill. Honestly, that should tell you something about where your opposition is coming from and whether you really think it's a bad bill, or whether it's just a bill you don't understand and have assumed must be bad because it's long and complicated.

 

Just make Sarah Palin president and create a death panel for small business employees and entrepreneurs, already.