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[SCD]

PB:  Your direct insult was not becoming of what I expected of you.  I'm disappointed that you would rely on direct insults rather than explaining what folly you saw, which I'm assuming is comparing two systems. 

[Thad]

However, by and large SCD is correct. Any document beyond a certain size is either so cumbersome as to be functionally useless, loaded with 'booby traps', purposely designed to intimidate the public it's supposed to serve, hiding something dreadful, or all of the above.

Or, god forbid, actually trying to comprehensively and unambiguously cover an extremely complex situation.

The Public Good is best served by legislation that does not leave questions about what it means.  Seriously, how is explicitly stating variables and closing loopholes not exactly what legislation should do?

Okay, I'll defer to the two lawyers in the thread, but...my layman brain says that a 5000-page document is going to have a hell of a lot of room for unintended consequences and nasty things lawmakers have thrown in that others might not notice.  Why am I wrong?

I'm not apologizing for Joe being a big fucking baby, mind you, but his gambit is exactly the sort of thing that is supposed to happen when your majority is so shaky.

Pity you had to clarify this, because I had a very good rant lined up about how the Democrats have more seats in the Senate than any single party has had since 1976.

That said, even without Lieberman and Nelson, the Dems still have more seats than the Republicans had when they impeached a President for getting a blowjob, went to war with a nation that posed no threat to us, retroactively legalized warrantless surveillance of US citizens, put Alito on the Supreme Court (another filibuster which Lieberman helped break!), and deregulated us into a global financial crisis.

If the Democrats had been a bit more successful about convincing other Senators of the merits of this bill, they might not have had to endure these histrionics.

But it was pure party-line.  Snowe's show notwithstanding, this bill was never going to get a single Republican vote.  The Dems could introduce an Every Senate Republican Gets a Handjob bill and the Republicans would still try to filibuster it.  (And the Democrats would still pass it.  After adding some kind of rider to restrict abortion so that Nelson would vote for it.)

I'd be a little less pissed at the Dems for being unable to get Republicans to cross the aisle if the sons-of-bitches hadn't been tripping over each other to be bipartisan when Bush was driving us into a ditch.

(but then hey you know what's best for all those hayseeds out there and how dare they question your judgment on how the most personal and private aspects of their lives should be governed)

Hayseeds, or strawmen?

Support for the public option was at 60%.  Support for the bill that passed is around 40.  The Republicans are being utterly disingenuous about WHY public support is so low, but they're right: the majority of the country opposes this bill.

I read a good article in the Christian Science Monitor this morning about how the Dems have successfully pissed off people on both sides of the issue and produced an unpopular bill, but I can't find it right now and JESUS CHRIST HOW DID IT GET TO BE 10:40 AT NIGHT?

...well, aside from finding the link, I think I've said everything I wanted to.  I'm going to bed.

[Kayin]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/12/14/091214fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all I found this to be an interesting read, though it still does not make me feel comfortable at all with the current bill. Might also just be crap. Wondering what the more informed denizens of Real World have to say!

[Brentai]

It's nice that somebody's pointed to the backend of the bill for a change.  You hear so much about fucking insurance that it's easy to forget that the bill is intended to reform the health care industry, not the insurance industry*.

Unfortunately I think the solution's a little bunk.  This isn't the industrial revolution, and our problem with health care isn't that it's inefficient.  The problem is that it's pretty much out of control.  Practitioners, manufacturers, and laborers all can-and-do set their prices at whatever they feel like, and nobody has much of a recourse since you can't exactly speak with your wallet when you need a breathing machine.  Improving our health care system isn't a bad goal at all, but as it stands the medical industry is just going to take those improvements to the bank with them and keep burdening the citizenry to the point where they have to rely on another wildly out of control industry to keep up.


* Which of course leads to the question of "why aren't we reforming the insurance industry first?", because at the moment AIG is fucking this country up way more than any biotech.

[Thad]

our problem with health care isn't that it's inefficient.

Well, it kinda is.  We spend a greater percentage of our GNP on healthcare than anybody else in the world -- and that includes all those dirty socialist nations who cover everybody.  Single-payer is a pretty streamlined system, really.

[Mongrel]

Starr was talking about this today. She pointed out that increased competition seems to actually raise health care costs, with fractured, viciously fighting little heath groups - the US Southeast being the worst offender. Whereas up here in Soviet Canuckistan, out west all the Health authorities are actually unifying, driving down costs (though the increase in bureacuracy is killing some of those savings, hoo boy).

[TA]

The problem is that it's pretty much out of control.  Practitioners, manufacturers, and laborers all can-and-do set their prices at whatever they feel like, and nobody has much of a recourse since you can't exactly speak with your wallet when you need a breathing machine.  Improving our health care system isn't a bad goal at all, but as it stands the medical industry is just going to take those improvements to the bank with them and keep burdening the citizenry to the point where they have to rely on another wildly out of control industry to keep up.

That's another nice thing about single payer systems - negotiating power.  If the only source of money for an operation isn't willing to pay more than $500 for it, you can't mark it up to $5000.  With more than a hundred private insurers out there eager to pass the expense to their customers, it's a bit easier to get away with.

[Catloaf]

But single-payer is socialism.  And as we all know, socialism is a combination of the worst aspects of both nazism and communism.

Ignoring the fact that insurance is also socialism--a group of people joining resources  together to (theoretically) yield a better outcome for all or nearly all.  But it's okay, because someone get's to skim that money off the top and deny you what you pay them money to hopefully ensure you of getting, and then make you pay for it directly as if you never had payed them in the first place, then they keep it for themselves and support our glorious oligarchycapitalism--a term which now mean democracy (but better because the morlocks don't get a vote).

[Büge]

 

[McDohl]

Buge, you deserve blowjobs for that.

[Pacobird]

Okay, I'll defer to the two lawyers in the thread, but...my layman brain says that a 5000-page document is going to have a hell of a lot of room for unintended consequences and nasty things lawmakers have thrown in that others might not notice.  Why am I wrong?

Given the current situation I understand why one might feel this way, but I would submit that if your default assumption is that your elected officials will abuse the legislative process to your detriment, the problem lies with either you or the elected officials, not the process.  As it stands, the loophole-closure exists to hamstring private parties; if the legislators are complicit in that corruption, it's another matter entirely.

That said, even without Lieberman and Nelson, the Dems still have more seats than the Republicans had when they impeached a President for getting a blowjob, went to war with a nation that posed no threat to us, retroactively legalized warrantless surveillance of US citizens, put Alito on the Supreme Court (another filibuster which Lieberman helped break!), and deregulated us into a global financial crisis.

And yet here we are.  I think Olbermann had this one right; the Health Care debacle is the best indication yet of the extent of corporate control in Congress, given the degree to which the insurance industry has been able to get Congressmen to go to the wall opposing it despite popular support going in that was at worst lukewarm.

Maybe we can find a way to spin the UHC debate so that it pits the insurance companies up against investment banks.

But it was pure party-line.  Snowe's show notwithstanding, this bill was never going to get a single Republican vote.  The Dems could introduce an Every Senate Republican Gets a Handjob bill and the Republicans would still try to filibuster it.  (And the Democrats would still pass it.  After adding some kind of rider to restrict abortion so that Nelson would vote for it.)

I'd be a little less pissed at the Dems for being unable to get Republicans to cross the aisle if the sons-of-bitches hadn't been tripping over each other to be bipartisan when Bush was driving us into a ditch.

Yes.  Still, this is an indictment of the Democratic Party, not the Democratic Process.  In my opinion, between this sentiment on the Left and the Tea Parties on the Right, the country's more ripe for a move away from bilateralism than it's been at any point since the Civil War, but Progressives are going to need to join hands with Glenn Beck to make it happen.  The truth is, we're the ones who have to play catch-up; the Right has already suggested they're open to abandoning the GOP, and as crazy as the Tea Party would be it would be preferable to the corporate-dominated GOP we have now.

For the Left and Right to ally themselves briefly to simultaneously reject the corporate parties we currently have would be unequivocally a Good Thing, but either side could stand to lose a lot by a betrayal from the other; already the Left is giggling to itself over the electoral prospects of the Dems with a divided Right.  Sadly, the U.S. currently too mistrustful to enable this.  Gee, I wonder who benefits by promoting that!

Support for the public option was at 60%.  Support for the bill that passed is around 40.  The Republicans are being utterly disingenuous about WHY public support is so low, but they're right: the majority of the country opposes this bill.

And it's really unfortunate, because UHC really is a no-brainer.  What I am trying to (glibly) explain is that the Left is going about explaining it the wrong way; the Right already thinks we're arrogant, and to speak about such a major issue as if it is self-evident, especially when so much is at stake, is doomed to failure.

[Bal]

The left is bad at getting things done, whereas the right is good at getting bad things done. Same old same old.

[Pacobird]

That isn't true at all.  The left ended slavery while simultaneously industrializing the U.S. economy.  The left ended the Great Depression while fighting the largest war in human history on two fronts and winning.  The left is, for better or worse, perfectly capable of accomplishing things as well as the right; it's just that traditional leftist ideology is more prone to run afoul of the interests of the super-rich. 

It isn't coincidence that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was totally undermined by his own party* on the Vietnam War, whereas Bill Clinton had a tremendously successful presidency rife with deregulation.

*fun fact: Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign was funded by six donors, and he would later go on to be a Plaintiff in Buckley v. Valeo, challenging restrictions on soft money campaign contributions




EDIT: I was curious, so I did some more research on some McCarthy contributors.  Here are a few!

Charles Stewart Mott, in for $215,000 ($1,316,496 in 2008). All-around philanthropist and decent guy, from appearances, but member of the GM Board of Directors, Republican Mayor of Flint, and Michigan Elector at the Republican Convention of 1964.  Draw your own conclusions, I guess.

Jack Dreyfus, Jr., son of Jack Dreyfus, in for $500,000 ($3,061,620 in 2008).  Details on Jr. are slim, but he worked for and inherited the fortune of his father, who basically invented the mutual fund.

[Norondor]

That isn't true at all.  The left ended slavery while simultaneously industrializing the U.S. economy.

Something to be proud of, here in the year of our lord 1871.

[Pacobird]

That isn't true at all.  The left ended slavery while simultaneously industrializing the U.S. economy.

Something to be proud of, here in the year of our lord 1871.

Hey, he was speaking generally, too.  The right sure was successful at using its leverage over all three branches of the federal government to outlaw abortion, yeah?

[Mongrel]

I read Norondor's quote more as a general lament for the fact that anyone could argue that the left of 1871 would actually beat the left of 2010 for progressiveness and accomplishments.

Anyway, the US has always looked more right-wing to the rest of the world than it has to itself. For whatever the hell THAT'S worth.

[Pacobird]

Now, now; the 14th Amendment holds up pretty well, I'd say!

[Mongrel]

Now, now; the 14th Amendment holds up pretty well, I'd say!

There's a joke in there somwhere about Section 4.

[Büge]

I'm more of a Section 8, myself.

[Catloaf]

The left is bad at getting things done, whereas the right is good at getting bad things done. Same old same old.

I agree with this statement, assuming it's only applying to the last 10 years.