8 comments

• Orion314

  February 6, 2014 at 7:27 pm

  re; the mystery of the disintegrating Republican party…The only logical conclusion I can arrive at is they are being threated by the POTUS’s new instrument of torture, i.e the IRS, additionally, they may be being blackmailed as well..I don’t say this in jest , i think it is a very real possiblity. I truly believe that the lust for power and revenge in our current political climate knows no limit. That fact that such actions are illegal , if not just plain wrong, does not even seem to register with these people. That not only seem amoral , but truly pyschopathic as well…
• rarchimedes

  February 7, 2014 at 1:07 am

  The psychopathology is found in the delusion of attack where there is none. Obamacare may cause problems for a few families, but for every family it troubles, there will be dozens that benefit from the many provisions for coverage of those who have had no hope of coverage or who have not previously had the means for coverage. Moving people out of the emergency rooms and mandating preventative care will gradually increase the health of the population as a whole. Like so many things in a democratic society, Obamacare is the worst of all possible systems except for all others that have been attempted through our divided legislative process. It is unavoidably clear that the best way to go would have been an extension with some modifications to the existing Medicare/Medicaid system, single payer and efficient, or as efficient as such things are likely to get. Is their corruption in the existing system. Of course, but less than in almost any other governmental agency. What it would have done is devastate the predatory, inefficient, and ineffective, private medical industry. Some of the non-profits in that industry are quite effective and well run, but the vast majority have been subsumed into commercial enterprises that are better at denying and overcharging than at actually providing health care. When faced with the requirements of Obamacare, they find themselves somewhat trapped into actually providing at least a modicum of care. Many of them have put forth deceptive ads to try to entrap the unwary or uneducated. The for-profit medical insurance companies are, almost without exception, predatory. The requirement that a certain percentage of premiums actually go to care or be returned to customers provides at least a small limit to their depredations.

  The most important provision of the current act is the banning of pre-existing condition clauses. This turns the process into the actual provision of insurance rather than the constant process of cherry-picking the customer base. Some of that will still exist, but it is limited by that provision and the requirement of actual use of a certain percentage of premiums for care.

  I for one, and I am sure many others would prefer a less compromised system for almost universal health care, but none is forthcoming. The system as it now is coming into existence will provide health care for millions who until now have been dependent on emergency care and it will improve the quality of care provided for the vast majority. If people would quit trying to destroy it and start trying to improve it, we all would benefit.

  As for the IRS, that whole thing was a bit of theater of the absurd. It turned out that the enforcement that was objected to was and for some decades had been the actual letter of the law. Both liberal and conservative groups were affected, but conservative groups were differentially affected because there was a concerted effort amongst conservative groups to use as a loophole what was not actually a legal tactic. As it turned out, not a single group was actually denied, though most of them should have been. They were not groups “promoting social welfare” as provided in the law. Besides, the guy responsible for the issue was a conservative Republican, though that had nothing to do with anything. Nobody likes any tax collecting agency, but this particular bit of paranoia is bogus.
• m d mill

  February 7, 2014 at 2:24 am

  More hypocracy of our “country club” Republicans, as follows…

  Hypocracy #1: The republican “leadership” agreed to a Patty Murry budget which broke the “sequester” and requires 1 trillion per year in borrowed funds(new debt)…now they say they will stand their “moral” ground on the debt ceiling!??. I think B.O. is a despicable “bxxxxxd”, but I can see his point on this. If you are not going to stand your ground on the budget (which is your constitutional right and duty), then you must reasonably and logically agree to the extra debt that your budget requires. The dem’s can beat those ‘publicans with a stick over this, if they are smart enough to use this arguement.
  Krouthammer and others are 180 degrees wrong on this one. The budget is were you stand your ground (let B.O. and harry reid “close” the government if they refuse to sign a reasonable budget…the country will go on amazingly well without it, and it will logically be all their responcibility). A hard debt ceiling stall by the republicans will simply cause a true financial disaster, which WILL be the republicans doing, and the public will blame them totally. Boehner will then give in (as he always does(has he ever won a confrontation?))…a lose,lose proposition.

  Hypocracy #2: Rebublicans voted for the sequester budget option, and it was working in actually reducing government spending; but now that it bites into pentagon contracter profits and jobs, never mind about that debt crisis rhetoric, this is the Republican style Keynsian “shovel ready” stimulus program.

  The Republical “leadership” are innane, hypocricital, fools.
• m d mill

  February 7, 2014 at 3:08 am

  In 1998 I was getting private hospitalization insurance in washington. It cost $40/month($55 for over 65’s), with $500 deductable, with 20% copay up to $2000 total maximum!!! I kid you not. Affordable and sane.
  Then lib/dems like yourself in washinton state invoked obamacare lite(~1998 health care “reforms”) which restricted and mandated the washington private policies, in ways you would expect lib/dem fools to do. The health care private insurers warned that this would cause prices to skyrocket. And so it came to pass within a few years.
  Don’t try to say private healthcare was not affordable.
  Lib/dems could simply not “stand” that it was not free for some guy living in a van down by the river, thats all…but they were not willing to simply provide “free care” with general funds…that would cost real money. So they forced the burden on others(as lib/dem authoritarian despots always do), and destroyed a very affordable private system in the process. Obamacare is the federal version of the same story.
  Even vouchers for the “poor” using that private system would have cost far less than what we are about to get.
  Almost certainly, these facts will not matter to you. You will find some way to ignore them. That psychosis is your own affair. The tragedy is that a “Tyranny of the Majority” can force your authoritarian inanities on the rest of us.
  I am completely happy not to interfere with the free exersize of your good life. It is reprehensible that you feel you have every right to interfere in the free exersize of mine?
• Robert Zimmerman

  February 7, 2014 at 8:46 am

  Like MD Mill, when I lived in New York back in the 1980s, I had affordable healthcare insurance, as a freelance writer. Then the New York legislature passed their version of what has become Obamacare. The result: my insurance was canceled, and I had to spend more money for less coverage. (See “A Level Playing Field”)

  You might imagine Obamacare is wonderful, but I base my contempt for it on actual data and experience, gathered first in the places it has already been tried (which includes the entire Soviet bloc) and then from the stories and data been released now as it is step-by-step implemented. The country will be a worse place for it, regardless of whatever unicorns or rainbows you fantasize it will bring us.

  As for the IRS scandal, please name one liberal organization that has been harassed as more than three hundred conservative organizations have? You can’t.

  It is really shameful that you see nothing wrong with the Democratic Party and Obama using the IRS to attack American citizens simply because they expressed their first amendment rights. When the same thing was done to leftists during the 1950s, you called in McCarthyism and thought it horrible. Now, because it isn’t your ox been gored, it is fine with you. Mostly shameful.
• Cotour

  February 7, 2014 at 2:26 pm

  The conversation here is about money “savings” and getting “more” people heath care, and I love this quote ” Obamacare is the worst of all possible systems except for all others that have been attempted through our divided legislative process.”. Nothing like quoting a great man (Churchill) and lull people into the illusion that Obamacare is the best of the worst. What BS. Are you a political operative hired to put out Obamacare fires where ever the “lies” about it are fostered on the web?

  The lowest common denominator should not be the goal of any American. For those who need help, let there be help, but do not drag everyone down to satisfy some Marxist wet dream.

  Obamacare and the unending debt obligations being created for the American people are a modern form of slavery and are meant as a means of control. Let us not delude ourselves.
• Edward

  February 7, 2014 at 5:37 pm

  “but for every family it troubles, there will be dozens that benefit from the many provisions for coverage of those who have had no hope of coverage or who have not previously had the means for coverage.”

  What a great excuse for tyrannical coercion. But at what cost?

  For every family that benefit from the many provisions, dozens will have to pay for that benefit, and all of us have lost the freedom to choose. The freedom to choose which plan we want (from dozens of plans for each of the dozen insurance companies available). The freedom to choose whether we want to even pay for an insurance plan at all. Healthcare insurance is no longer a right, which we can choose to no exercise, and is now a duty, which we must use our hard-earned money to buy.

  Another cost to dozens per beneficiary is the availability of full time jobs. Many companies have been moving people from full-time to part-time status in order to keep expenses, and product prices, low. Some people will have to work second jobs in order to pay for the mandatory healthcare insurance, thus those workers suffer the additional cost of lost free time.

  Another cost is the loss of access to doctors and hospitals. In order to save money and keep premiums low, many health plans (e.g. Covered California) have dropped many of the previously approved hospitals and their doctors. This cost could be the loss of lives due to lower quality healthcare.

  Oh, and the emergency rooms are 40% busier under Obamacare. More crowded, not less crowded. That is another cost to all of us.

  Obamacare is without question or (except from you) argument even worse than the (mostly) free market system that we just abandoned. And putting government in charge of all the rest of the medical system through a single payer plan would just give us an even worse system. When government is in charge, all you get is what government wants. When We the People are in charge, we get what We the People want.
  The president once suggested that granny should take a pill and wait for death rather than undergo an expensive procedure just to add a few years to her life. *That* is what government wants from its universal healthcare system, but We the People want the additional years.

  You say that it benefits people? I say that I am one of the many who are harmed more than the benefits to those few.

  As for the IRS: the issue was not denial but Big Brother harassment. How many liberal groups were told that if they did not give lists of members, speakers, and contributors they would go to prison? That is yet another cost: loss of freedom of assembly, speech, and apparently the right to petition government.
• Edward

  February 7, 2014 at 5:41 pm

  The Republican leadership is a pack of liberals. That is why they are opposed by the conservatives.

  To quote or paraphrase somebody, with Republicans like these, who needs Democrats.