This is enormous. Kennedy’s seat being won by a Republican. Incredible! Not just that, but it would never have happened but for Obamacare, Cap & Trade, and above all, Democrat high-handedness. Is (was?) there a bluer state than Massachusetts? There is no doubt that this was a referendum on national issues. Brown campaigned solely on those issues.
"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard 'round the world."
UHHH no, my guess is party infighting by dems created this situation.
There is an very, very old saying which goes like this.
ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL. That’s it.
One senator does not make it a problem. If I were a guessing person today, I would say that the dems will
lose 20-30 house seats and breaks even on senate this year. No problem. health care will pass this year.
My thought is for the dems to stop waiting for the GOPers to cross the aisle. Simple as that.
They are simply stalling, stalling and stalling some more. Wait no more for them.
The teabaggers will seriously hurt the GOP this year is my other thought. They will be encouraged and it won’t turn out well.
I must say, on one level I hope this particular bill doesn’t pass because it is not a very good bill.
too much pork for big pharm and hmo’s. A cleaner bill would certainly help out the situation.
But even a small measure would help to show people the lies of the GOP.
health care is so screwed up in this country some sort of bill will eventually pass and
it will be without the crap that this bill has.
You’ve officially lost touch with sensibility and reasoning Mr. K.
Until Torts Laws are changed, and scumbag lawyers are either regulated, or preferably executed; nothing will help.
The other major problem is that State’s have to much regulatory control over insurance; which effectively stymies adequate competition.
Nothing that comes out of government will ever help. Giving unearned healthcare to scumbag illegal aliens isn’t going to help the situation either. I’d have thought you being from California, you would’ve learned from the epidemic those pukes have caused there. There is no such thing as a bill from our government that isn’t assloaded with earmarks and unlawful pork.
As a side note, the inglorious deceiver, Chairman Maobama, has done a fabulous job with “transparency” on the healthcare legislative process, has he not?
OH, WAIT …
No, he didn’t, because he is exactly the same manner of deceitful puke that the Village Idiot was … 6 on 1, half dozen on the other.
i was thinking about it and it dawned on me. What is the right really saying?
You can, by several standards, make the case that the U.S has perhaps the worse
health care system of any industrial country and that is clearly because it has the private system we have.
Now What is the right saying is that we cannot run an health care system as well as France or Sweden or Germany
or Japan. So what it is really saying that our government is so incompetent and inept that it cannot do what other
government can do such as the french, Swiss, Sweden, Denmark. So what the right is saying is we as a country is
we are inept and incompetent beyond other counties. It is a negative commentary on us as a country. We cannot do what other
countries routinely do. I think it is an amazing commentary on america by the right.
Recall that the US is ranked 37 by the WHO and such countries such as France, Sweden, japan, Denmark, Germany
are ranked higher than the US. All countries with so called 'socialised" medicine. Not only are they better, but they cost
so much less than the US which leads one to not only to our government is incapable of running an health care system,
but we are incapable of running any sort of system cheaper than other governments. I don’t believe I have ever heard
a more negative commentary on the American way of life outside of AL-qaeda or perhaps the Taliban.
To continue my thought about health care, let us begin by looking at first how much health care actually cost.
a list to put our health care in perspective.
The following table is compiled from the data in the World Health Organization Statistical Information System.
For explanations, please refer to notes below the table, and to the latest version of the World Health Statistics publication available at who.int/whosis/.
So we spend as a % of our cost which is far greater than other countries such as Sweden, Spain,
Norway, Italy, and France. are we getting what we are paying for?
There are plenty of states that have enacted Tort reform and it hasn’t significantly brought down cost. It is certainly an issue of billions of dollars but the problem we are facing is on the order of trillions of dollars.
If it were me, I would have given the Republicans retort reform as a negotiating chip to get them on board with a health care bill. But the lawyer lobby co-owns the Democratic Party so that wasn’t gonna happen.
I disagree. A number of my clients are directly invovled in healthcare in a number of States that have recently enacted Tort reform to cap the insane punitive damage awards that jury’s were awarding. Even the early results are a substantial decline in the amount of litigation actions, claim activity and a return to common sense within the medical industry. Doctors aren’t refusing to perform certain procedures for fear of $20M lawsuit should something happen in - wait for it - a “risky” procedure.
More importantly, actuaries across the board are anticipating a significant decline in commercial carrier (direct and reinsurance) premiums in those states over the next 10-20 years as the frequency and severity trend downwards now that the parasitic casualty lawyers have left.
Apples to oranges.. You’ll note that I did say it would save money but the money saved isn’t enough to actually provide a solution. The US spends 2.3 Trillion dollars annually on healthcare. ~1.5% of that does represent a lot of money. But in the grand scheme of things, it is small potatoes. The effect on states with and without shows similar results. Look at Texas, where the recent Tort reform where malpractice costs dropped from around 100 million to 2.8 million. That is an amazing drop! But let’s suppose that tort reform were enacted on a national scale and every state with it got the same amazing results. So (100-2.8 )*50=4,860. That is 5 Billion dollars saved! A huge sum of money. But that is still only 2.1% of US Medical spending. Given that America is hemorrhaging money on healthcare, I don’t think that 2.1% is enough of a difference.
I agree with Felix that it would have been nice to compromise on tort reform (money saved is money saved, after all) and if that can be coupled with changes to the system that would actually make the system work, well, that would have been fantastic.
Now back to the grind. For all that money what do we get?
Well in terms of life expectancy at birth, according to the CIA, yep, that CIA,
the US is ranked 50th in the world behind such powerhouses as Australia, Canada, Sweden,
Italy, Germany, Finland, Denmark, the UK and our friends in France. If we recall that we spend
15% of our GDP on health care and France spends 11.2 but as Xunzian points out we spends trillions and
France probably spends billions.
Now let us look at infant mortality.
The US ranks 33 behind such countries as Italy, Canada , the UK, Denmark, Spain, Germany, and of course
France.
So we two rather big factors in which we are worse than countries that spend trillions less than us.
Not very good bang for the really big bucks we spend.
It works better if you calculate it on a per capita spending basis. The American economy is huge and so its corresponding numbers are also huge.
Everybody,
For fun, create an aggregate of the countries you feel are in America’s class. By whatever scale you want. List your countries and why you include them. Who you think is on par with America is a subjective evaluation, after all! Take American spending on healthcare (2.3 trillion/year) and divide it by the American per capita spending on healthcare as of the most recent estimate ($6,714). Remember that number. Now split the difference between the current American number and the number you generated as your aggregate. Healthcare reform takes time and is difficult after all. Then see how much money we’d save.
I’ll take the Canadian system as an example, for simplification. Similar geography, post-British colonies, yada-yada. In Canada, it is US 3,678 per capita. An average value is therefore: 5,196. 2.3 trillion divided by $6,715 is 1.8 trillion. 2.3 trillion - 1.8 trillion is 500 billion dollars.
So, if the American system where between where it is now and where the Canadian system (not the best system in the first world, btw) is, we’d be saving 460 billion dollars a year. That is 20% of current US spending on healthcare.
The median between a broken system and an OK system results in a 20% savings. But clearly, what we need to focus on is something that represents a savings of somewhere between 1.5 and 2.1%! Obviously!
The healthcare debate is a joke. Especially when those against reforming the American system talk about fiscal responsibility. There are other philosophical justifications for the American system. We can discuss them if you’d like – if you can name them. But fiscal responsibility ain’t on that list.
Given the power that has been accumulated in Washington from the states, locals and individuals, and the immediacy of our communications, the US IS local. Brown ran strictly on national issues, and it worked. You/the Dems can believe that and maybe only get spanked in November, or continue to arrogantly go about Democrat business as usual and get clobbered/demolished.
Americans (including many independents, “moderates” and even some big-government Democrats) are pissed. The party’s over. Obama was only able to exert negative influence in Virginia, New Jersey and now Massachusetts.
You are making a huge mistake thinking that this is some sort of referendum on Obama.
Sometime voters just like a candidate better then another candidate. And all politics is local.
