| fastyxx said: It's really not worth my time, as it's not about trying to change someone's mind. It ain't happening in either direction. We'll see, as we usually do, in about 10-20 years who was right. When the sheep run back to "safety" 2.5 years from now (and to a lesser extent this fall) and go back to Bush-style policies - which is exactly what Boehner is promoting - and everything cycles back to what started all this mess in the first place, I hope you all enjoy it immensely. Health care was a ticking time bomb in this country. Now costs will be up slightly, but virtually everyone will get health care - - and the end result of it isn't a complete meltdown for the small businesses and working/middle classes the way we were headed. I'm sorry, but you can't put a price on taking care of your citizens. We're willing to spend trillions to protect 4,000 people from dying in an attack but we're not willing to spend the same to help millions stay healthy and safe and productive? Ridiculous. Mafoo- you're quick to cite the CBO when you feel lie it will help, but never when they say the opposite. Read the fine print. Compare the original CBO report six weeks before the bill passed to the one that actually passed after the moderate/right concessions were made to get the last few votes. It doesn't go far ENOUGH to really hit the cost points. (And by the way, I assume you are in favor of ending the Bush tax cuts if you care what the CBO has to say about things so much.) If he does nothing else in his presidency, he has changed the way we view and understand health care, and in a way that we will look back at the way we were doing things in 2005 and think we were insane. It may not be in the exact form that passed, but it will be different and caused from this first step. And it's historic and something to be proud of. Again, I already know your responses, and I really don't care, and I don't plan to come back and read the demands that the poor kid with cancer is plum out of luck because the wealthy guy with the sweet hookup has to pay an extra $50 a month. That the girl in my class who died of organ failure in the waiting room while the private hospital squabbled over her unemployed parents' lack of insurance was just screwed because her parents didn't want her to live enough. If they did, they would have just wished themselves CEO of Apple or something. That my friend who is unemployed after cutbacks and goes out and looks for suitable work every day should just kill herself and stop being a drain on society. My next door neighbor did that when I was little. Didn't work out so well for his kids. Can the government solve all these issues alone? No. We all pitch in directly as well. But without that net, it'll be chaos. I'll stand by my original point. He's less than 20 months into a 48 month term, inheriting perhaps one of the 5 worst situations for an incoming president in our history. He's facing a completely oppositional party and made the mistake of believing that they did want to compromise on some points, and he has a gutless bunch of moderate "dems" in the middle that want only to keep their jobs. And the item that he spent almost the entire first year on can not in any way be fairly judged for ten years. There's no way to judge his presidency as "worst" or "best" or "average" or anything at this point. We can barely now really get a grasp on the Bush years. We'll need another decade or so. Hell, we're just now getting a handle on Clinton/Bush I/ Reagan. Don't confuse disagreement with policy with some sort of miraculous ability to see outcomes that no one can see, particularly on the economy, which is the definition of unknowable, even by the most brilliant economists. |
You're making a fairly large assumption that Obama's healthcare bill will actually increase the number of people with access to decent healthcare. I'm far more skeptical, and I suspect that you will see massive growth in the number of individuals who are hired on contract; insurance premiums will continue to increase because everyone is mandated to own health insurance, competition has been discouraged, and insurance companies will need to recover the costs of individuals with pre-existing conditions they can't deny anymore; and since there was absolutely no effort to resolve the problems that are leading to such explosive growth in medical costs (preventative healthcare) the costs will continue to increase at the same rate they were before the bill was signed.
Or to put it another way, the people who like this bill the most tend to be those who know the least about it; and when you actually dig into what this bill will do you start to realize how moronic it was.
