wolf howl said:
Civilized said:
caryking said:
Civilized said:
Oldsouljer said:
Civilized said:
hokiewolf said:
No kidding. It's this hyperbole that solves nothing with respect to healthcare. Saying that is saying "I don't want to fix it"
Really?
Because it sure seems like what solves nothing is Republicans wanting to Monday Morning QB and delete Obamacare without ever doing the hard work of coming up with a more affordable, more accessible, more inclusive plan.
If someone in my family doesn't like the dinner spot that gets thrown out to the group, they have to come up with something better or else we just stick with what we have.
If one of my staff points out a problem on a job without also suggesting a solution, I remind them that announcing problems is the easy, low-value part of ultimately addressing an issue.
Like Smapty said, you may think Obamacare is now too expensive (but not without acknowledging the since-deleted mandate helped address the affordability piece).
But you can't with any level of serioiusness say that the Republicans have put forth anything that's better because they haven't put forth anything at all. They've just done the easy part without adding any value.
Aside from care for prisoners and veterans, I've never been clear on why medicine and medical insurance is any Constitutional business of the federal government.
Because it's ridiculous to take a strict constructionist stance on issues like this. The Constitution was written in 1787, decades or centuries before industrialization, the Internet, global markets, or nationwide healthcare systems existed.
National or global issues can't be managed effectively by 50 separate states.
And private industry and the market has shown it's incapable of providing adequate coverage and care for Americans, absent incentives and/or participation by the government.
Which first-world countries enjoy the best health outcomes and highest ROI on per-capita spending? How do they administer care? Which countries rank lowest on that same scale (I'll give you three guesses but you'll only need one).
And they probably rely on the US for all their defense..
No they "probably" do not. That is obviously and demonstrably false.
And regardless, again, their per-capita spending on health care is far LESS than ours. It's not like they're just spending more per-capita than us, throwing more money at the problem than we are, and getting better results that way. They have systems that are far more efficient than ours and they spend less per-person than we do.
We spend more, and get less for those dollars, than any developed nation in the world.
If someone comes to you and says "we have a system that will cover more Americans, provide more adequate coverage, and we'll spend less per-person than with the old system," what would your response be?
Of course everyone would want that but you're either raising taxes or cutting services/budget somewhere else to achieve it the way healthcare is setup in the US today.
The US spends grossly more on healthcare for a worse product/outcome. That needs to be fixed. Hospitals being profit centers is absolutely driving a significant portion of that problem. That model needs to change first, IMO. Unfortunately, the more government gets involved, the worse everything seems to get for citizens so I'm not sure how to do this effectively, and certainly not in today's political climate.
Fair post, and agreed. It's a real challenge with no easy, obvious, solutions. It's going to be a slog.
One of the things I feel strongest about though is we can't in good conscience repeal-and-not-replace.
It is totally unnecessary and counterproductive and speaks horribly of us as a nation to have a spike in cancelled insurance coverage for the ill, deferred and deficient care, medical bankruptcies, and an overall decline in quality of life just because we're in a hurry to score political points.
If you want to repeal Obamacare, perfectly fine, but we've got to figure out what to replace it with that's an improvement first, and "improvement" doesn't simply mean "a cheaper solution for the federal government and a much more expensive, less effective solution for tax-paying Americans."