yeah, you went out of your way to defend a comparison of our president to the worst mass murderer in the history of the world, yet you cry like a baby when a noted racist and stain on our country is compared to him. facts discerned.
Your assignment of "relevance" is what is universally referred to as editing. Point mine. My "acceptance" of the comparison was made on the one shallow point regarding pragmatism. The criticism of me cascaded from there in a hysterical fashion. My defense was about what the one statement said and did not say. You all just want to run roughshod over that and ignore the truth of that observation and I won't let you. In a few places in that thread, I distanced Obama from Hitler based on other things being brought into the discussion but that in no way changes my thinking about the original argument made by Sowell that both are pragmatic politicians. That does not make them both mass murderers, does it? Sowell didn't say that ever. His "harshest" point of comparison was probably the accusation of socialist leanings but he never went as far as mass murder which is what your side feasted on. Point mine.
I didn't go out of my way. I stuck with the fact of what was written by Sowell about their political approach. It was all of you who extrapolated a simple and limited observation into the kind of equation that aghast did with Hitler and Thurmond.
Show me where what I'm saying is inaccurate. If you can't do that, just drop your argument. You are making these blind assertions based on some kind of emotional prejudice without looking at the facts. At least BigBenito went after the facts. Of course, he had to change them to suit his argument.... but at least he tried!
it's been explained to you numerous times. you've shown your true colors (over and over and over). i'll let you continue whining about the piling on. enjoy.
So why is it okay to compare Obama to Hitler and not Thurmond to Hitler? Hitler is known for his hatred for a particular race. Is Thurmond any different?
Because you have 1000 pages of information, and even perfectly clear language can be taken out of context to create whatever false impression people want. For an example, see the "death panels" which were clearly nothing of the sort. The language was not unclear or imprecise or anything like that. The point you're missing here is that those 47 million people are *already* in the system. They are going to the ER and getting emergency surgeries and the like - it's just being done at taxpayer expense, and in a scenario when the surgeries are done in a more crisis stage when they require more resources. You'll definitely have an increase in primary care needs, but less need on the emergency care side of things. I'm not sure where you're going with this. There are two parts here that you mention: the waste, and the CBO. Much of the waste aspect in based on the silliness of the whole Medicare Advantage program - Obama can't just eliminate that on his own. Eliminating/reforming that program is part of the bill. The CBO estimate shows $800-$1T in costs - not trillions - and no one has suggested otherwise. The CBO, if you believe them, also shows those cost savings from Medicare Advantage, etc. The goal is to make the bill end up deficit-neutral using CBO projections, despite the fact that the CBO is not allowed to consider secondary cost savings from preventive care, etc. Why would it lead to elimination of jobs? That would only work if the gov't option didn't require manpower. And if that's the case, shouldn't we be asking what on earth all these insurance industry people are doing? If 40 million new people are going to enter the system, that should *increase* insurance employment because there will be more claims to be processed, more customers needing information, etc. On the latter point about private industry competing - why, specifically, do you think they wouldn't be able to? If you think the gov't bureaucracy will be big, that would make the public option inefficient and less competitive, right? But on the bigger point, if you really like single payer anyway, why would you care? At the end of the day, if everyone is switching to the government option, then that means they prefer it anyway. What amendments are you talking about? None of the bills have even reached the floor vote yet where the major amendments get put into play. Right now, there are just a bunch of separate committee bills. That's when you'll surely have no-funding-for-abortion amendments. Several things here: 1. Businesses provide health care as a competitive advantage over other companies. That incentive doesn't change with this bill. 2. Right now, there is a 0% cost to not providing health insurance; in the new bill, there would be an 8% cost using your numbers. In either case, the employee is left without health insurance unless they pay for it out of their own pocket. Why would they drop health care in that scenario but not now? 3. Your latter sentence seems to be stated in a negative way, but earlier, you posted that you liked the idea of single-payer. Which is it?
Giddyup, please be the first to quit quarreling with the others. It is a quibbling game anyway. There are no positives to be gained. If not, create a sparring thread and waste Clutch's space there. That goes for everybody else as well.
Sorry - What are your solutions to the problems you bring up? Two of them seem to be pretty easy: 1. No-abortion-funding amendment 2. Increasing the employer penalty (lowering it just seems to make the incentive more for you) Your other two problems are that you don't seem to believe the CBO projections and you don't like the public option, despite liking single-payer health care. Oddly, these two are at odds given that the public option is a big part of keeping costs down. I'm not sure ANY health care plan would be able to simultaneously address your concerns about hurting the health industry while also lowering net costs. Reducing per-person profits to the health industry is a necessary part of cutting those costs. The carrot that they get is 40+MM new potential customers, if they can provide a better service than the government can.
You've offered a cheap opinion with no factual backup. Others have done the same. And you respond to each other rather than do the work of seeing what was actually written.
It's more than quarreling, but I do have to get to work. If they would just post something factual the "quarreling" might cease. Yes, let's preserve precious server space for some of the highly purposeful threads that appear here about boobs and stuff....
Major: Our timing in this thread is unfortunate. Every time you respond I get called to another commitment, in this case actual business rather than food or football. You seem knowledgeable about the health care issues and I do wish to pursue it further. Apologies for having to delay this for now.
I'm a congressional staffer in DC, I thought I mentioned it in another thread, but that might have been on a different forum. Sorry for the confusion.
