Posts Made By: James C Chandler Jr

Paul Kammueller said:

Coercive -- Do you mean to tell me these tea partiers are fighting for their right to be uninsured? Serious? 8O

But there are coercive policies with regard to auto insurance too. Should we make that optional? Then try to collect the next time someone who 'opted out' suddenly rear-ends you. :S

You have coercive policies where one person's non-participation robs his fellow citizens. Because his non-participation coerces his neighbors to pay higher costs when he puts off healthcare until he finally makes a long-postponed, uninsured and extremely expensive visit to the ER. So I would put to you the existing system is more financially coercive. It's just disguised better.

In order to have universal coverage in a privately based system, to make it work you have the double-mandate: everyone has to get insurance, and no one can be denied insurance. That's just what makes sense.

patrick bailey said:
Which lefties are running around today screaming revolution and making bombs?

By our count, the president made more than 20 inaccurate claims in his speech to Congress. We have excluded several comments that are deeply misleading but not outright false

1. “Buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer.” The Congressional Budget Office writes, “Premiums for policies purchased in the individual insurance market are, on average, much lower...

2. “There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.”An outright falsehood, whether you use the president’s noncitizen-free estimate or the standard, questionable estimate of 46 million uninsured residents...

3.“And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage.” The paper that generated this estimate assumed that two months of severe job losses would continue forever. Applying that paper’s methodology to a broader period of rising unemployment (January 2008 through August 2009) produces a figure below 9,000...

4. “One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy. . . . They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it.” He didn’t die because of it. The originator of this false claim, a writer for Slate named Timothy Noah, has admitted he got it wrong.

5. “Another woman from Texas was about to get a double mastectomy when her insurance company canceled her policy because she forgot to declare a case of acne.” Scott Harrington supplied more facts in the Wall Street Journal: “The woman’s testimony at the June 16 hearing confirms that her surgery was delayed several months. It also suggests that the dermatologist’s chart may have described her skin condition as precancerous, that the insurer also took issue with an apparent failure to disclose an earlier problem with an irregular heartbeat, and that she knowingly underreported her weight on the application.” The woman deserves sympathy, but Obama has stretched the truth here.

6. Rising costs are “why so many employers . . . are forcing their employees to pay more for insurance.” Perhaps no other issue generates as much of a consensus among health-care economists as this one: The “employer’s share” of employees’ health-care costs comes out of those employees’ wages, not out of profits...

7. Rising costs are “why American business that compete internationally . . . are at a huge disadvantage.” False. The rising cost of health benefits does not increase employers’ labor costs because, again, wages adjust downward to compensate. The Congressional Budget Office, under the leadership of Obama’s OMB director, Peter Orszag, confirmed that health-care costs do not hinder competitiveness...

8. “Those of us with health insurance are also paying a hidden and growing tax for those without it — about $1,000 per year that pays for somebody else’s emergency room and charitable care.” That number comes from a left-wing advocacy group. A Kaiser Family Foundation study debunked the group’s analysis, reaching an estimate closer to $200 per year for a family...

10. “[Reform] will slow the growth of health-care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government.” In July, CBO director Douglas Elmendorf said, “In the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount...

11. “Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: Nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.” Obama’s wording is lawyerly: While not denying that his plan would cause people to lose existing coverage with which they are satisfied, he leads us to believe that he is denying it. But even on its own terms, Obama’s claim is false...

12. Requiring insurers to cover preventive care “saves money.” Nope. According to a review in the New England Journal of Medicine, “Although some preventive measures do save money, the vast majority reviewed in the health economics literature do not.”

13. “The [bogus] claim . . . that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens . . . is a lie, plain and simple.” Sarah Palin claimed that Obama’s “death panels” would deny people medical care, not actively kill them. If Palin believes her claim, it is not “a lie, plain and simple.” Most important, the substance of Palin’s claim is, in fact, true. Obama himself proposed a new Independent Medicare Advisory Council with the authority to deny life-extending care to the elderly and disabled.

14. “There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” For better or worse, the president’s plan would, in his words, insure illegal immigrants...

15. “Under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions.” Unless Obama refers to some draft legislation inside his head, this claim is false...

16. Critics of the public option would “be right if taxpayers were subsidizing this public insurance option. But they won’t be. I’ve insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects.” How quickly we forget the example of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Like those institutions, the public option would benefit from an implicit subsidy...

17. “And I will make sure that no government bureaucrat or insurance company bureaucrat gets between you and the care that you need.” Unless the president proposes to abolish insurance, or abolish all care management, there will always be tension between patients, doctors, and public/private insurers over what patients “need.”...

18. “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future.” “The plan will not add to our deficit.” None of the bills before Congress can credibly claim to keep the deficit from rising...

19. “Now, add it all up, and the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over ten years.” Even the supposedly parsimonious Baucus bill would cost closer to $2 trillion than $1 trillion once we “add it all up.”...

20. “The middle class will realize greater security, not higher taxes.” Obama would make health insurance compulsory for the middle class (and everyone else). If he thinks that isn’t a tax, he should listen to his economic adviser Larry Summers, or his nominee for assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at HHS, Sherry Glied. Both liken the “individual mandate” to a tax, as do other prominent health economists like Uwe Reinhardt (Princeton) and Jonathan Gruber (MIT). The CBO affirms that the penalties for non-compliance “would be equivalent to a tax or fine.”...

21. “I won’t stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are.” Who are these special interests? In case Obama hadn’t noticed, everyone from the drug-makers to the unions to the insurance companies he demonizes are spending millions to build momentum for his version of reform — in no small part because Obama has promised to buy them off with middle-class tax dollars.

When President Obama makes a factual claim about health-care policy, he does not deserve the benefit of the doubt about its accuracy. We do not know whether he has been badly misinformed or is deliberately trying to mislead. Either way, he cannot be trusted to reform American health care.

Mike Strieber said:
Fellas; it's time we do some self-policing here or we are going to lose this forum. While I agree it has perhaps degenerated to a point it’s not worth saving, there's still time to do a turn-around....I hope. I like this forum but I haven’t contributed nearly as much as I used to as I’ve grown weary of reading bickering and personal grudge matches. I have to say this might be the worst thread I’ve seen here in my several years participating in this forum and unfortunately it has become the norm. If it sounds like I’m whining, well I am. And for the five of you that will come on to say “you don’t have to read them” I say if this keeps going you won’t have any to read either.
My $0.02,
Mike

Jim Moscheck said:
BTW, the "marriage thread" was the most interesting topic here in a long time and I'm glad I stopped by today. More times than not all it takes is a quick glance of the political forum to see it's mostly just a bunch of like minded slappys patting each other on the back and preaching to the choir about what a jackass the CIC is or ganging up on one or two guys on the left. I wish there was more interest in debate of the issues and finding answers to the problems we face instead of just attacking the other guy.

James C Chandler Jr said:
There is something related to human nature-- Moths to a flame-- Red Flag + Bull-- Accident on the side of the road--

The dumbest threads often attract the most traffic from both sides. Mud fights also attract traffic. Not always, but often.

On another forum frequented by generally bright folk, there was a member who knew everything, with ideas so odd that they "were not even wrong". Young Earth with crystal spheres of water that caused the flood when they burst. Theological-commie economic theories so naive that it would embarrass any self-respecting commie. No reasoning, regardless of its elegance, could even budge the fellow.

Every dumb thread he would start, would draw in all members to argue/explain to the fellow, stretching into long tortuous threads. No one WOULD ADMIT to enjoying the threads. Everyone thought the fellow was using up all the oxygen with his posts. But in spite of this, every time the fellow would post an incredibly dumb allegation, smart folk with much better things to do just couldn't resist getting involved. All the while complaining about the lack of quality threads.

Simultaneously, if a thread was started on something decently interesting, it might die with a couple of replies, or none at all. Perhaps the 'reasonable topics' were not outrageous enough to motivate folks to reply?