I just love that they plan to let loose “scorpions” on us.

And I know they love it, too.

-Dave

Dave R. on March 22, 2009 at 2:56 PM

Must have read Ayn Rand’s ANTHEM…

It does not matter if it can be proven, cap and trade is leverage to go green to create jobs.

Its all about creating jobs.

Stop fighting it.

getalife on March 21, 2009 at 12:49 PM

LOL-Did you make it past the fifth grade?

-Dave

Perhaps this is a sign that

TOTUS RULES!

RalphyBoy on March 21, 2009 at 5:39 PM

Good post. Made me drop my teabag for a second there.

oddjob1138 on March 21, 2009 at 4:56 PM

I’d bet the reason health care survived is that it’s the touchy-feely one that the downtrodden will benefit from keeping him popular. He tries cap and trade in this economy and he’d be lucky to still be around to run in 2012.

Agreed. “Health care.” Such a simple, soothing sound. “Cap and Trade.” No harmonics. It doesn’t feel warm, fuzzy, comforting. And (just my cynicism shining through here…), I’d bet 90% of America doesn’t know what it means. It’s hard to sell something that doesn’t have a pretty ring to it. No easy-pleasy stump speeches off that one.

Americans, regrettably, have become hopelessly ill-informed (or perhaps I’m being gracious, and we really always were, en-masse?).

Hope <<< Proven seller
Change <<< Proven seller
Health Care <<< Gonna sell!
Cap and Trade <<< Duh, what?!

We are where our ignorance allowed us to be.

My mother, who is over 65, just went in to see our family doctor for a cold and she asked him about the Dems health care plan. His response, he did not know very much about it! We have known this doctor for quite some time so it is not as if this was a situation where he would have been talking to a patient that was new.

Next, my husband is in pharmaceutical industry, and if you think the doctors and the AMA are, or could be problems; just wait until you hear what the pharmaceutical industry has to say! Many of the muckety mucks are Dems and most companies cave like a cheap suit to the government in order to stay out of the cross hairs of the FDA or the government as a whole. My husband says that most in the industry will go along to get along and not realize what has happened to them until it is WAY too late.

I believe Kelley from VA had a very good question, and one I keep asking over and over and over. Where indeed is Steele on fighting this, and the same for the GOP! If they would start fighting now, and blitzing the media it might just keep Specklesnow and others from getting off the game plan. Yes, I too am hearing crickets chirping.

What no one seems to be paying attention to is the number of illegals and those who are young and chose not to get insurance. These are at least half of this mythical 45 million uninsured Americans. The rest for the most part are like my mother’s next door neighbor who is in her 50′s and chose not to pay for insurance for the past ten years!

This is the one adjustment/socialistic program that we must fight like mad. As Rush says, if this thing gets passed it will ruin the nation and it will be just like Social Security, and other entitlement programs that we cannot reverse. This could be an assault on America that we may never come back from. It certainly will weaken us as a democracy and a republic!

— Abraham Lincoln

We have to fight them both.

Also folks, we should stay on task with the tea parties because this should be a ploy to get everyone to let down their guard. We can’t give up. This isn’t a situation where we can feel satisfied with shoo-ing off the problem. We have to destroy the problem. (cap and trade and socialized healthcare obviously).

…reading Karl Marx is not getting an understanding of economics.

It’s doubtful most of them have ever read Marx. More likely they’ve “heard” someone who “listened” to someone else who “knows” someone who may have read an article by someone who has never actually read Marx, but “knows” all about him.

I’ve read Marx and thought WTF?

I’ve also read The Black Book of Communism and thought WTF-ing hell is wrong with these people?

It must be nice to have your every utterance treated as gospel (The Gospel of the New Left), by Mainstream Obamabots, and then conveniently put on hold when the need arises.

“We’ll put that global warming, correction, “climate change,” on the back burner, while we mess up the health care system as much as we’ve messed up the economy. Damn the Tea Party Protesters, full speed ahead!”

This is the question: How can we “keep a republic,” to use Ben Franklin’s phrase, if the body politic is consistently misinformed?

The answer: We can’t.

That’s why our nation is morphing into a Euro-socialist state even more potent than Europeans dare dream of.

Keep at it Hot Air. It’s getting tough to breath down here.

Solar farms in the deserts, wind farms on the coasts, cool cars, new energy grids, this is the future to create millions of jobs and stop giving billions overseas.

Move forward cons.

getalife on March 21, 2009 at 12:41 PM

Problem is, San Fran Nan is pushing for a ban on solar plants in the deserts. Which as far as I’m concerned is Proof-Positive that “environmentalism” is nothing but a cover for misanthropic BANANA-ism (Build Absolutely Nothing, Anywhere, Near Anything).

I’m sympathetic toward thermal-solar, tidal-generation, just about any kind of nuke-plant technology under the sun (with the exception of sodium-cooling; we need neither Chernobyls nor Soviet-style sub plants, thanks kindly) – in addition to coal and gas-turbines; not as a replacement. So long as pubic money is NOT used to fund it, more power and more technology to make it are great. Tell the enviros that, though – and have ear protection handy.

This myth that “science” (which they really use to mean optimistic futurism and a desire to advance technology forward) is the sole province of the loony left has got to end.

Politics isn’t rocket science – but all the rocket scientists I know are Republicans.

canditaylor68 on March 21, 2009 at 12:37 PM

Solar farms in the deserts, wind farms on the coasts, cool cars, new energy grids, this is the future to create millions of jobs and stop giving billions overseas.

Move forward cons.

getalife on March 21, 2009 at 12:41 PM

Creating millions of new jobs just to produce the same level of energy we now use, would be extremely inefficient.

But if all that matters is jobs, not how efficient or productive they are, then I can play that game, too. In fact, I won’t let you claim to support jobs more than me! I’ll top you right now.

I propose we create jobs for everyone by legislation. It doesn’t matter what they do, since apparently the important thing is to have a job, no matter what that job is. So we can create jobs for redistributing the leaves in the forest. All lawn mowing can be done with scissors, so mowing a lawn will put hundreds of people back to work, not just one. See how much I love creating jobs? More than you!

Or maybe you could actually ask yourself if “creating jobs” is itself the measure of economic recovery.

What’s more efficient? Creating jobs for people to build windmills that produce little power? Or creating jobs at oil rigs by domestic drilling, then creating more jobs at domestic refineries?

Your suggestion, frankly, is not very smart. Try again.

So, one bullet gets dodged for a while. Problem is I can’t trust these guys. They’ll find some other way to sneak bits and pieces of this stuff through.

I just had to go through open enrollment for my company benefits starting April 1, and they did have a healthcare spending account option. After digging through that and the traditional insurance model, I can see why one would do one or the other. I don’t think you’ll get people to give up their insurance for a high-deductable, health savings account that is tied to 80/20 or 85/15 style insurance unless there’s some significant tax breaks or credits given also.

But, after talking to a family member who is retired, and under Medicare, and retirement insurance from his company that he worked for, I find that the options for retirees are dwindling.

If Obama has his way, the old folks will be thrown under the bus and get less and less coverage, probably due to the tax breaks for corporations offering health care going away.

Then, he’ll make darn sure that his political base (read “inner city voters and illegal immigrants”) have their benefits. The rest of us poor schmucks get tossed to the wolves.

The goal here is to silently dismantle the private insurance framework. If you don’t see that as their endgame, I suggest you follow this carefully and watch every move they make.

The key problem here is that no one who wants to do any changes has the foresight to stop, think and ponder what the long term ramifications are. We’re engaged in a march towards massive changes that will impact future generations in ways that we cannot contemplate.

What really frightens me is we used to expect our politicians, regardless of party, to be able to be somewhat far-sighted. As we move forward, I wager that is less and less the case.

I can only hope that the fire these dummies are playing with burns them. I’m seeing signs that the American centrists and conservatives and Republicans are waking up and beginning to realize this guy doesn’t get it, and will keep continuing down the same hard-iron-fist path until a metaphorical 2×4 hits him square in the head. Maybe losing the House to the Republicans in 2010 will be the answer. I don’t know.

1. Medibank and then Medicare caused people to drop their medical insurance. In turn this has led to pressure on the hospital emergency department in hospitals all around Australia. The reduction of participants in the private health scheme has also meant rising premiums (and it keeps getting higher).

2. The increase of individuals attending the hospital emergency department has caused a mismatch in the allocation of hospital funding resources in public hospitals – meaning that scarce resources are being diverted from other areas of the hospital for use in the emergency department (budget).

3. The misallocation of these scarce resources has in turn led to a crisis within the hospital industry. Hospitals are having difficulty paying their suppliers (I have worked for one of the suppliers in the past – TYCO Healthcare – and I was well aware of the funding problems within the system).

4. The lack of funding is due to state governments not allocating enough to the hospital system. This is due to a few reasons including the demand by nursing and other staff for exorbitant increases in their pay. It is also due to the commissioning of new equipment (technological change).

5. State governments get their funding from the Federal government. It could be argued that the Federal government is not allocating enough to cover the hospitals. However, I think that the fundamental flaw is that the legislation that covers Medicare has inadequate provisions for looking at real expenditure in a realistic way.

My last point will make more sense if you consider the fact that Medicare has a “scheduled fee” which does not match what is being charged to the patient. This is best explained through looking at the differences between the cost to the patient for a visit to a specialist and what is returned via Medicare. I can go to a skin specialist and have to pay more than $80. (up to and over $100). The schedule fee is $55 and what is then paid back to the patient is about $35 (or less). That is a huge gap between what the doctor is charging (he has to pay staff costs, and other costs) and what is paid via Medicare.

This is true for a lot of other services. The legislation is written such that certain services are not funded, yet if you have private cover, what is returned is also limited meaning a patient with certain forms of medical conditions ends up being well out of pocket.

At the same time, someone who is working has to pay a levy to cover the Medicare costs. If the person never gets sick or attends the doctor then there is no refund of that levy. If someone does not work, then it can be argued that this person is living off the levied taxes of others (it is a % of income, so the more you earn the more you pay as the medicare levy). Also, if husband and wife and other adult family members are in the work force then that household pays at least double for the Medicare levy.

In the long term though it has led to the choking of the hospital system as more and more people require operations that are considered to be “elective” surgery.

This form of government interference has not led to a better health system.

This person is totally clueless. If I was her teacher, then I would have to grade her with an F. The grade would be due to the following:

1. inability to reason; has a tendency to parrot others and cannot think for herself.

2. inability to understand the fundamentals of economics – reading Karl Marx is not getting an understanding of economics.

3. spends too much time adulating Obummer.

4. needs to learn to read other forms of material and cut down exposure to what comes from Gibbs and the White House.

5. needs to spend more time learning about the intricacies of reasoning.

6. Needs to get a clue