Republicans...
Once again, your party and I are put in an awkward situation.
I agree with your feelings towards public health care. It's no good. I don't like the idea. Bad move. We agree on this.
However, once again, you don't know how to get shit done. You say, "No public health care!" That's all fine and good... Until Democrats say, "Ok, what's your plan?"
"...huh. Umm... yeah... no public health care!"
That's not a plan!
Make a plan! An ALTERNATIVE.
Because I think it's clear that if Democrats have a plan that they like, it's going to pass eventually.
It shouldn't pass without a decent amount of debate and speculation... but it will pass.
So you're doing a good job of slowing it down, and talking it over... except, you're not really talking it over.
You're just saying no.
But "no" isn't going to keep us away from public health care.
Another idea of how to reform problems in the health care industry is what we need.
So come on, let's go. You're embarrassing conservatives and people who agree with you.
ramblings of a semester untold, III
12 years ago
1 comment:
I still don't understand why you're against any kind of public care (considering the nations with the best healthcare in the world are single-payer systems, and that isn't going to happen in the United States for awhile, unfortunately).
Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post said it better than anyone in his latest column:
"...The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.
Under any plan likely to emerge from Congress, the vast majority of Americans who are not old or poor will continue to buy health insurance from private companies, continue to get their health care from doctors in private practice and continue to be treated at privately owned hospitals.
The centerpiece of all the plans is a new health insurance exchange set up by the government where individuals, small businesses and eventually larger businesses will be able to purchase insurance from private insurers at lower rates than are now generally available under rules that require insurers to offer coverage to anyone regardless of health condition. Low-income workers buying insurance through the exchange -- along with their employers -- would be eligible for government subsidies. While the government will take a more active role in regulating the insurance market and increase its spending for health care, that hardly amounts to the kind of government-run system that critics conjure up when they trot out that oh-so-clever line about the Department of Motor Vehicles being in charge of your colonoscopy.
...
When Democrats, for example, propose to fund research to give doctors, patients and health plans better information on what works and what doesn't, Republicans sense a sinister plot to have the government decide what treatments you will get. By the same wacko-logic, a proposal that Medicare pay for counseling on end-of-life care is transformed into a secret plan for mass euthanasia of the elderly.
Government negotiation on drug prices? The end of medical innovation as we know it, according to the GOP's Dr. No. Reduce Medicare payments to overpriced specialists and inefficient hospitals? The first step on the slippery slope toward rationing.
Can there be anyone more two-faced than the Republican leaders who in one breath rail against the evils of government-run health care and in another propose a government-subsidized high-risk pool for people with chronic illness, government-subsidized community health centers for the uninsured, and opening up Medicare to people at age 55?
Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society -- whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.
If health reform is to be anyone's Waterloo, let it be theirs."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/06/AR2009080603854.html?hpid=topnews
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