The Biggest Threat to Obama's Health Care "Reform" - Reality - Page 35

Dismissal, dismissal, dismissal. Time for you to go back on ignore. Back under the bridge for the troll.

I'm going to beat on a couple of these points a bit. First though I do want to thank you FL for going back and actually citing information for what you are contending. As you can see, even if the person doesn't end up in agreement with you completely it persuades more than assumptions, and attacks which is what many around here have done so thanks.

Now to hit on an underlying assumption here. First just like now, Republicans alone were not responsible for the health care plan going down the tubes in 1992. It didn't have the votes then. It barely had them now if not for bribes and bullying. The debate both times was within the Democratic party because they were the group with large majorities. In 1992, just as now it came down to conservative Democrats and one of the parallels was the fact that the Dems holding all three branches forced a series of votes that basically made DINO's come out of hiding.

Is this starting to sound familiar? It should because if you were say, a Stupak who just sold out your pro-life constituency or you voted for things like stimulus, cap and trade, etc. and you claim not to be towing the party-line vote, then as a Democratic candidate, you have been revealed. The Obama argument came down to wouldn't you rather have an energetic 35% to go against the majority rather than an unenthusiastic but several knew they would end up walking the plank.

The Republicans ran on the Contract with America. It was anti-dependency, pro-jobs, and anti-government growth. They did a pretty job job with that agenda getting us to a balanced budget, passing welfare reform three times until Clinton signed it, etc.

You can see that they did pretty good on what they declared they wanted to do but as is par for the course, they can't win them all. We do remember the government shut down happening in there and Clinton skillfully turning it against the Republicans.

As for being measurably worse now than it was 12 years ago of course health care is worse in terms of affordability. However there is no proof that government intervention has improved this, quite the opposite. Government already spends almost half of all health care dollars via Medicare/Medicaid and the various state agencies (in California it is Medi-Cal.) It is easy to see that every segment of the economy the government pushes itself into has rises in cost that outpace inflation and delivers returns on quality that are below average on a cost to benefit analysis. This isn't just true for health care but is also true for higher education, housing, etc.

So the only place we can look at health care where government isn't in control of half the dollars is elective care. In that area the gains are very, very clear. The cost of something like Lasik eye surgery and the equipment and care used are much better and the cost is lower as well. This is true for an array of plastic surgery procedures as well. It is sad that government has become so pervasive that we simply cannot find many example where it isn't involved but when we do, the outcome is pretty clear.