Universal Healthcare...an idea whose time has come??

Not allowing companies to pay off our elected representatives is unconsitutional?

Lobbying, cronyism, soft money, subverting the system, no matter what you call it, it's not an unalienable right!

Give it a rest and enjoy the 4th!

Not allowing companies to pay off our elected representatives is unconsitutional?

Lobbying, cronyism, soft money, subverting the system, no matter what you call it, it's not an unalienable right!

Give it a rest and enjoy the 4th!

Pay off? As long as there is full disclosure, I don't see the problem. If voters have their attention drawn to it, which elections guarantee, they have their choice to replace the elected official. Limiting individuals rights to address their government would be unconstitutional.

Pay off? As long as there is full disclosure, I don't see the problem. If voters have their attention drawn to it, which elections guarantee, they have their choice to replace the elected official. Limiting individuals rights to address their government would be unconstitutional.

Well, I do! It's supposed to be one person, one vote, not one vote per $X! Lobbying is out of control and there is most certainly not full disclosure. McCain/Feingold have the right idea on campaign finance reform!

Conflict of interest laws/regulations do not violate the constitution. They do not prevent people from voting, speaking freely, running for office, using government services or facilities, or violate anyone's "rights".

Violating the spirit/and of letter of the law is not a constitutional right. If anything, subverting the election & law making processes and receiving unequal representation is unconstitutional.

Well, I do! It's supposed to be one person, one vote, not one vote per $X! Lobbying is out of control and there is most certainly not full disclosure. McCain/Feingold have the right idea on campaign finance reform!

Conflict of interest laws/regulations do not violate the constitution. They do not prevent people from voting, speaking freely, running for office, using government services or facilities, or violate anyone's "rights".

Violating the spirit/and of letter of the law is not a constitutional right. If anything, subverting the election & law making processes and receiving unequal representation is unconstitutional.

First, how has McCain-Feingold helped? Seems that Soros didn't have a problem getting around it.

And here is the First Amendment. I've bolded the part that addresses it, since you'd probably miss it.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Conflict of interest laws do not prevent people from petitioning or accessing the government. If they truly believe in a company, product, idea, or are for/against a law, they can petition their government, peacefully protest, or speak out against it.

Making a profit off it is something different!

What they prevent is people being paid for their influence and political or familial connections.

BTW, did you get your $50 ear drops yet, Chickpea? ;-) Hope its better soon. :wub:

Conflict of interest laws do not prevent people from petitioning or accessing the government. If they truly believe in a company, product, idea, or are for/against a law, they can petition their government, peacefully protest, or speak out against it.

Making a profit off it is something different!

What they prevent is people being paid for their influence and political or familial connections.

If the ?conflict of interest law? prevents individuals from petitioning their government, which you?ve said it should, then yes it does. If grass is green, then grass is green. Saying that companies shouldn?t be able to profit if they petition their government is Marxian. Hell, the green companies would probably be the first to falter if they weren?t allowed to petition the government. Again, as long as there is full disclosure, then there isn?t a problem. The voters themselves can decide if they want to re-elect those mingling with K Street.

BTW, did you get your $50 ear drops yet, Chickpea? ;-) Hope its better soon. :wub:

I did thanks!! Feel like a new person - pain is dulled and medication making me super drousy!!

:clap: :cool:

I realize how I have taken for granted the fact that medication will always (hopefully) take away my pain - reminds me of a friend who was had horrible migranes and could find no way to alleviate them - feel lucky that up to now I am receptive....

Did anyone see Michael Moore's temper tantrum on CNN today:lol:
http://www.breitbart.tv/html/2823.html

remember when the govt was in charge of health care?

i do. it's called VETERANS AND MILITARY CARE.

that's worked out real good for all involved, huh?:idontno:


p.s. we live here by choice to AVOID socialized medical care.

Thanks for posting that very interesting link Dr. Skunky :clap: :clap: :clap:
At least some one has the OMB's to stand up to mainstream media! :clap:

I :wub: how he pointed out the fact that at least Hillary had a plan 14 years ago, and also pointed out the fact that at least she was brave enough to try. Even though she was fired down she did manage to help all of America's children get access to health care. How can that be wrong? :idontno: :wub: :wub: :wub: ;-) 😀 Why should these big corporations be in charge of our health? 47 million Americans have no health insurance :yikes:because it's just not in the budget. They're doing good just to have food and rent. :wub: Do these big insurance and pharmacy companies do any good will coverage for anybody's family, like the local churches, workplaces, electric companies or grocery store's Angel Tree, do they ever adopt a family? :confused: :idontno: Just curious? Never heard of that but I learn new stuff everyday, especially on Sowal :wub: (the South's #1 source of VSP) ;-)

Here's one take on Sicko.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmFkYTQxZTdiMjI2ZTRkYThmZmE2MDhmMWFkYmZkNjg=

And upfront - Dr. David Gratzer, a physician, is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute

A Prescription for SiCKO
Michael Moore?s sloppy approach to the health-care debate.

By David Gratzer

Fourteen years ago, Harry and Louise joined us in our living rooms and told Americans about Hillary Clinton?s health-care proposal. To liberals, the insurance industry-sponsored TV spots represented the worst of American politics: the negative tone, the oversimplifications, the dramatic accusations. Robin Toner, writing in the New York Times, suggested that the ads ?played on people?s fears.?


ClintonCare wasn?t sunk solely by two fictional characters sitting around a kitchen table. The complicated nature of the plan, coupled with the White House?s bungled strategy, did more to damage the cause than advertising executives could ever have fantasized ? by the end, even Hillary Clinton?s Senate predecessor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, came out opposed.

But even after Harry and Louise went to TV heaven, joining Morris the Cat and the Glad Man, the ads left a lasting impact on the liberal psyche: lampooned at the Academy Awards, described in countless books, and even earning their own entry on Wikipedia. How, though, have liberals reacted to Michael Moore?s documentary, which has much the same bravado? Unsurprisingly, they have been lavish in their praise.

Moore suggests in SiCKO that American health care doesn?t simply need a shot of government assistance, it needs radical surgery ? of the government takeover kind. Moore sees no role for private insurance, waxes poetic about price controls (particularly for pharmaceuticals), and looks to Cuba as a role model. There are, of course, well-reasoned people who favor some type of government-based health-care solution. Moore?s documentary distinguishes itself not because of its argument ? goodness, almost every prominent health economist in academia makes a similar case ? but by its fast and loose nature.

Moore claims that ERs don?t overcrowd in Canada. Yet a recent government study suggested that only about half of patients are treated in a timely manner. Moore suggests that Britain offers quality medical care; meanwhile, one in eight Britons waits more than a year for surgery. France is held up as the promised land, with free health care, doctor home visits, and even laundry service for new moms. Not a word, however, about the heat wave of 2003 that killed 13,000 elderly because the hospital system was unresponsive.

The factual errors are plentiful. Moore claims that HMOs arose from a Nixonian plot, hatched out in secret in the White House. He plays a grainy tape to make his case. Actually, the legal groundwork for this type of managed care was laid by the HMO Act of 1973; co-sponsored, incidentally, by Senator Edward Kennedy. Moore explains that after Nixon embraced HMOs, health care became scarce, leading to shortages (he plays accompanying footage of a hospital ER with 18-hour waits). Moore?s hard-luck stories are all unverified. The saddest case involves a young man with renal carcinoma, in need of bone marrow transplant, who has been denied the procedure by his HMO. Actually, there is no evidence that such an intervention would have been helpful; no doctor would advocate this procedure.

Moore?s argument would not have survived, in other words, a basic fact-check. Yet, the reviews are sterling. Brilliant, important, enthralling are all words used to describe it.

Liberal columnists have been particularly effuse with their praise. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Clarence Page gushes: ?He uses the same big-screen pop culture that brings us Paris Hilton and ?American Idol? to summon our eyeballs to something truly valuable: a vision of how much better America?s health-care system could be.?

Ezra Klein of the American Prospect, who writes often on health reform, offers an absurd explanation of his fondness for the film: It?s not actually about health care, rather it?s a metaphor for ?American exceptionalism.? The New Republic?s Jon Cohn ? arguably one of the smartest voices on the Left in this debate ? concedes some ?trepidation? at the beginning of his review because ?Moore has not always been the most intellectually rigorous storyteller.? And in SiCKO, he finds ?intellectual dishonesties and arguments without context? ? but finds a way to makes peace with the film: ?Still, by the time the final credits ran, it was hard to get too worked up about all of that. Because, beyond all the grandstanding and political theater, the movie actually made a compelling, argument about what?s wrong with U.S. health care and how to fix it.?

Even Canadian columnists forgive Moore for his creative interpretation of facts. In ?Moore is Right,? Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom gushes about the film, but recognizes that the portrayal of Canadian ERs is a stretch ? ?To any Canadian who has ever been forced to go to emergency, this would seem unbelievable.?

How does Moore manage to simplify an argument to the point of absurdity, yet walk away with so many endorsements from people who know better? Perhaps liberals simply cherish the documentary as a day-dream ? a fantasy world reshaped by leftist ideas.

And Moore offers a wonderful world. It?s not just that the Canadians like their government-run health care; they?re so damn magnanimous about it ? the Canadian senior doesn?t mind paying for his countryman?s health care because ?he would do it for me.? The sharply dressed British doctor maintains that the public sector pays a good salary, rejecting the idea of American-style compensation. He can?t own ?six homes,? but why would he want to? And the French? Not only do they have post-natal laundry service, they are all so pretty and chic!

For 14 years, liberals have wondered about the world that could have been if not for Harry and Louise. Moore wistfully paints that picture.

But if liberals have endured 14 years of regrets, the rest of us have faired pretty well. As it turns out, the disaster scenarios liberals predicted in the early 1990s never came to pass. The percentage of uninsured remained stable; health spending didn?t hit 19 percent by 1999, as the Clinton White House forecast; corporate America never collapsed.

Instead, over these years, American health care has enjoyed some modest successes: the rise of consumer-driven health care, first and foremost. And American medicine continues to innovate and excel. Death due to cancer has, adjusting for aging, dropped 1 percent a year, every year, since the early 1990s.

If Americans have fared well over this past decade and a half, people with socialized medicine have not ? just as Harry and Louise warned would happen in the U.S. with HillaryCare. Thus, at a time when Americans are celebrating their medical achievements, Moore?s beloved French are examining their health care system. In 2004, Health Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy didn?t mince his words: ?Our health system has gone mad.?

That is not to say that reforms aren?t needed here. It?s just that Michael Moore has nothing to contribute to the debate. Maybe that?s because Harry and Louise weren?t so wrong after all.

Everyone has something to contribute. That's his right just like it is yours, 6G. ;-) :wub: :wave:

A little late on this, but just wanted to let you all know that I am in graduate school to become an advocate for issues relating to healthcare....yet this thread has been more thought-provoking and educational than anything I have learned or discussed in school over the past year. So thank you for that! And just as a side note...you all do a much better job of respectfully disagreeing with and challenging one another than anyone in my program seems to be able to do!😀

I saw this today and thought it was interesting in light of this recent discussion.

SCHIP of Fools
By David Hogberg & Paul Gessing
Published 7/19/2007 12:07:55 AM

SCHIP stands for the State Children's Health Insurance Program. It was created in 1997 by Congress and President Clinton, and this year it is up for reauthorization.

SCHIP was intended to cover children in families who made too much to be eligible for Medicaid. The law was originally supposed to limit eligibility to families making not more than 200% of the poverty line ($40,300 for a family of four), but seven states set eligibility above 200% anyway. Furthermore, fourteen states have applied loose enough definitions of "child" to extend coverage to parents, pregnant women, or childless adults.

Democrats in Congress are trying to capture the spirit of those states. Bills sponsored by Sen. Hillary Clinton (NY) and Rep. John Dingell (MI) would permit states to expand SCHIP up to 400 percent of the poverty level. For a family of four, that means $82,600 a year. Thus, children in families that are in the top 25 percent of income-earners would be eligible for government-funded health insurance. We'll bet you didn't know that poverty reached so far up the income ladder, did you?

That same legislation would expand the definition of a "child" even further. Under the Clinton-Dingell legislation, states could offer Medicaid coverage for families who have "children" up to age 25. According to the Democrats' vision, those who are old enough to drive, vote, enter the military and drink alcohol are still in swaddling clothes when it comes to health insurance.

Strategically, it would seem that the Democrats are trying to achieve universal, government-run health insurance by making more and more Americans "children." The thinking seems to be that if government covers enough young adults and the children of enough people high up the income ladder, then eventually enough of the public will be supportive of extending such government insurance to everyone. Call it "socialized medicine on the installment plan."

Left as is, SCHIP would cost about $25 billion over five years. The cost to taxpayers for the Clinton-Dingell version would be about $85 billion over five years. This past week, the Senate has tried to appear more "reasonable." In the Senate Finance Committee, Senators Max Baucus (D-Montana) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) crafted an SCHIP bill that would spend "only" $60 billion. It would also only fully match states' SCHIP spending to cover children in families with income up to 300% of the poverty line. States will receive only partial funds if they decide to enroll children in families above 300% of poverty. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that strategy. The Democrats can reasonably assume some states will enroll children who are above 300% of poverty, thereby creating a new constituency for more government-funded health insurance. Five years from now you can bet that constituency will be pushing Congress to fully fund children in SCHIP who are above 300% of poverty.

However, Baucus and Rockefeller have had some help from the other side of the aisle. Republican Senators Chuck Grassley (IA) and Orrin Hatch (UT) have worked to craft this "compromise." Again they have forgotten that the GOP is supposed to be the party of Reagan, not the party of "let's spend, but just a little less than the Democrats want."

Recruiting new recipients isn't the only way SCHIP will move us closer to a government-run system. It will also make private insurance more expensive. The program at best puts modest demand restraints on recipients. With little to restrain their demand, families on SCHIP will increase their use of health care. This will increase the cost of health care which in turn will increase the cost of private insurance. As the cost of health insurance goes up, so will the number of employers dropping their insurance and the number of uninsured. Although, to our knowledge, no academic study has focused on the cost-effects of SCHIP, a recent paper (PDF) has found that the introduction of Medicare had profound effects on the cost of health care. There is little reason to think that SCHIP hasn't had a similar, if less profound, effect.

Then there is the problem of "crowd out." Crowd out occurs when government programs intended to help the uninsured subsidize those who would otherwise have had private health coverage. Often times, employers of lower-wage workers decline to provide insurance knowing such workers can qualify for program like Medicaid and SCHIP. A recent study by Jonathan Gruber and Kosali Simon suggested that crowd-out for SCHIP ranged between 30%-80%. In other words, for every 10 kids signed up for SCHIP, the number with private insurance drops by 3 to 8.

While Congress and presidential candidates looks for new ways to intervene in our already heavily socialized health care system, consumers are growing increasingly frustrated with what they perceive to be inadequate care at prices that are too high. Ultimately, what steps like SCHIP expansion might accomplish (whether by design or not) is to make the current system implode, thus causing a crisis that opens the door for a single-payer system. We can hope this does not happen, but in the meantime we must fight hard against the further government interventions in the health care market these efforts represent.

A little late on this, but just wanted to let you all know that I am in graduate school to become an advocate for issues relating to healthcare....yet this thread has been more thought-provoking and educational than anything I have learned or discussed in school over the past year. So thank you for that! And just as a side note...you all do a much better job of respectfully disagreeing with and challenging one another than anyone in my program seems to be able to do!😀

:wave: welcome to the University of SoWal, Shamu!

Cheese Headcases
Wisconsin reveals the cost of "universal" health care.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

When Louis Brandeis praised the 50 states as "laboratories of democracy," he didn't claim that every policy experiment would work. So we hope the eyes of America will turn to Wisconsin, and the effort by Madison Democrats to make that "progressive" state a Petri dish for government-run health care.

This exercise is especially instructive, because it reveals where the "single-payer," universal coverage folks end up. Democrats who run the Wisconsin Senate have dropped the Washington pretense of incremental health-care reform and moved directly to passing a plan to insure every resident under the age of 65 in the state. And, wow, is "free" health care expensive. The plan would cost an estimated $15.2 billion, or $3 billion more than the state currently collects in all income, sales and corporate income taxes. It represents an average of $510 a month in higher taxes for every Wisconsin worker.

Employees and businesses would pay for the plan by sharing the cost of a new 14.5% employment tax on wages. Wisconsin businesses would have to compete with out-of-state businesses and foreign rivals while shouldering a 29.8% combined federal-state payroll tax, nearly double the 15.3% payroll tax paid by non-Wisconsin firms for Social Security and Medicare combined.

This employment tax is on top of the $1 billion grab bag of other levies that Democratic Governor Jim Doyle proposed and the tax-happy Senate has also approved, including a $1.25 a pack increase in the cigarette tax, a 10% hike in the corporate tax, and new fees on cars, trucks, hospitals, real estate transactions, oil companies and dry cleaners. In all, the tax burden in the Badger State could rise to 20% of family income, which is slightly more than the average federal tax burden. "At least federal taxes pay for an Army and Navy," quips R.J. Pirlot of the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce business lobby.

As if that's not enough, the health plan includes a tax escalator clause allowing an additional 1.5 percentage point payroll tax to finance higher outlays in the future. This could bring the payroll tax to 16%. One reason to expect costs to soar is that the state may become a mecca for the unemployed, uninsured and sick from all over North America. The legislation doesn't require that you have a job in Wisconsin to qualify, merely that you live in the state for at least 12 months. Cheesehead nation could expect to attract health-care free-riders while losing productive workers who leave for less-taxing climes.





Proponents use the familiar argument for national health care that this will save money (about $1.8 billion a year) through efficiency gains by eliminating the administrative costs of private insurance. And unions and some big businesses with rich union health plans are only too happy to dump these liabilities onto the government.
But those costs won't vanish; they'll merely shift to all taxpayers and businesses. Small employers that can't afford to provide insurance would see their employment costs rise by thousands of dollars per worker, while those that now provide a basic health insurance plan would have to pay $400 to $500 a year more per employee.

The plan is also openly hostile to market incentives that contain costs. Private companies are making modest progress in sweating out health-care inflation by making patients more cost-conscious through increased copayments, health savings accounts, and incentives for wellness. The Wisconsin program moves in the opposite direction: It reduces out-of-pocket copayments, bars money-saving HSA plans, and increases the number of mandated medical services covered under the plan.

So where will savings come from? Where they always do in any government plan: Rationing via price controls and, as costs rise, waiting periods and coverage restrictions. This is Michael Moore's medical dream state.

The last line of defense against this plan are the Republicans who run the Wisconsin House. So far they've been unified and they recently voted the Senate plan down. Democrats are now planning to take their ideas to the voters in legislative races next year, and that's a debate Wisconsinites should look forward to. At least Wisconsin Democrats are admitting how much it will cost Americans to pay for government-run health care. Would that Washington Democrats were as forthright.


http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010374

And two more articles showing that it's not health care - it's the tax code.


http://www.heritage.org/Research/HealthCare/wm1316.cfm

http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3459466.html