Palin supporter: "Well look here, it's a couple of gay guys, a couple of gay fellas"

But you are making a jump that isn't part of the legislation. Why argue against legislation about something that isn't part of the legislation.

You are claiming that once it runs out of money the rationing of health care will happen to elderly or special needs children. That's based on your guess of what will happen, not what's in the bill.

According to the bill it won't be bureaucrats who are deciding the life and death of the elderly or special needs children. The proposal talks about all of that and nowhere does it say anything like what you and Palin are claiming.

It's one thing to hazard a guess at what will happen should the program not be able to sustain itself, but to act like it is part of the legislation is silly.

Nothing in that bill says elderly or special needs people won't get the care they need. To claim otherwise is to be either ignorant or dishonest. To claim otherwise and use your own special needs child, parents, and include terms like 'Obama's Death Panel' is idiotic, crazy, and stupid.

 

You're missing the point. Palin's criticism doesn't apply to any proposal that has a chance of coming out of Congress. Private insurance will still be available, so there is only a chance of a net increase in coverage, both on the individual and national levels.

So she was wrong by any interpretation of her words. But this wasn't a simple disagreement with an administration with a difference of opinion. It was a call to arms--she and her radical supporters are fighting "evil" (her word)--and when you fight evil, all bets are off.

 

And, based on public polling trends, (unfortunately) highly effective.

 

Well, duh, if it did then nobody would vote for it...what you're basically saying is that you don't believe the bill can have ramifications beyond what's said in the bill...that's ridiculous. That's like saying the cash for clunkers program won't run out of money in a few days because there's nowhere in the bill where it said it would...

Just because a bill doesn't include something doesn't mean it can't happen. There are amendments, there are changes, and then there are consequences of a bill...none of which are taken into account in what you're saying.

 

Your faith in the accidental ethics ("accidental" because, in free-marketeer-speak, ethical behavior is alleged to be a natural side-effect of making a profit) of the so-called "free market" is more akin to religious faith than to rational analysis - it always appears as if free-marketeers believed the proposition first, and then set out to find the ways in which all of their experience confirms the proposition as true.

 

For the record, FranchiseBlade,
we should probably just agree to disagree, and I think the point where we disagree is the money/cost of the bill and government-centered healthcare.

I think it won't be affordable..you probably think it will be and I think we just go astray from there.

 

You also proved the point I made in an earlier post about people using extremes...way to go...you're making me look like a genius...

 

So why not leave it at that? Why go to lengths to apologize for the national face of the psychotic fringe of the Republican party?

 

Because I don't think they're a psychotic fringe...I think they're using extreme tactics to prove their point. Like I said earlier...everyone does it. Numerous people here have proved my point, and any time a politician needs to get something past...they usually do it. I just don't see why there's so much shock/disdain when Sarah Palin does it. lol Hypocrisy at it's finest.

 

Doesn't have to be written in the bill for it to happen. Use some common sense, here. The bill is not a fortune teller, it's not Nostradamus, it doesn't have line by line what's going to happen in the future. It has policy and it has legal garbage, and from that there are consequences. You can't just worry about what's written in a bill, you have to worry about the consequences that follow what's written in a bill. If you can't understand that, I don't know what I can do to help.

 

Forget it. Some people refuse to understand that "difficult decisions" will have to be made when (not if) the demand for health care services of those covered by the public plan exceed the available funds.

You know what else isn't in the bill? There is nothing in the bill that indicates how services will be paid for once the funding runs out. I guess services will be rendered until then and once the money runs out, there's a big f you. That couldn't be...it isn't in the bill, so the money must be limitless. Yay!

 

You apparently understand logic and are using some kind of reason.

The bill makes it necessary for something to be done...but can't possibly cover all contingencies for what has to be done when something goes wrong...it's impossible. This is when consequences occur, choices have to be made. The whole "that's not in the bill thing" doesn't work.

I think people are forgetting about social security...and the unfunded liability...I don't think that was in the original bill...look at what the government does, look at how poorly they do it, then figure out that you don't want them doing anything else major in your life.

 

ref, and logic. You are saying that it doesn't have to be written into the bill for it to happen.

So at least admit that it is your own prediction of what will happen, and not actually based on the legislation.

So the death panels are just figments of Palin's imagination. Which people(trig or her parents) would qualify to have those decisions made for them are just figments of her imagination. In fact the bill itself specifies that that won't happen because the end of life decisions in the bill are voluntary based on the patient.

So what she's calling evil is her own made up predictions of what will happen. She's making up stuff to lash out at, which is the whole point I was making about her being crazy, and and idiot. She's acting like that is part of the legislation.

It seems like the two of you are saying that anything like that isn't part of the bill and would happen after funding ran out.

 

There's also a long history of insurance companies rejecting people's treatment needs. There was just a story several months ago about the insurance company that kept rejecting a patient's need for a transplant (lung, I think?) until hours before she died. We have plenty of gov't insurance right now, from Medicare to Medicaid to state high risk pools to CHIP. And we have no history of gov't doing any such thing.

Fearmongering that we should keep private health insurance because the gov't might do such a thing while we have plenty of evidence of the exact opposite is nonsense.

 

That's an interesting claim, given that the specific bill hasn't been written.

In the version with the self-sustaining public option, it is simply connected to rates. If costs run up, rates go up. Very simple, market-driven mechanism that works just like private insurance.

 

My apologies for piling on and basically repeating what a couple posts above me mentioned, but...

It seems that the source of your opposition is simply a couple fears you have about how the new system will work. Assuming the rest of the opposition has the same reasoning, one can understand why the tactics are based primarily on fear-mongering, since those fears are the basis for their dissent.

Having fears about the plans potentially being enacted is perfectly reasonable. But what I don't understand is the source of those fears. What are the reasons behind them. Opposition based on fear is only reasonable if the fears themselves are reasonable. For the most part we only hear about the fears and not much in the way of logic to explain why those fears exist.

I would be very curious to hear more logic behind them. So far, Refman, you have mentioned that you think that the money will run out, which will necessitate rationing. Is that based on the current plans being proposed, or is that based on your assumption that we will eventually move to a single payer system? I fail to understand why anything in the currently debated bills would work differently than how private insurance works now.