Third Party & Independents Archives

As I’ve said the RSP takes no stand on social issues and as a strong advocate for RSP, neither do I. I see the HC issue as just another instance of government failure. Just like immigration, education and a host of other issues the government has failed to legislate proper regulatory law for HC. For good reason. Government has worked for 30 years continuously and aggressively to bust up the fortunes of the middle class and put them on a par with Chinese coolie’s so that we may compete in the globalized economy. Wages were held flat while education, healthcare, energy, you name it, went up by 10% year over year for nigh 30 years. So, they have finally brought us to this point. A point where the few and weak middle class workers are carrying the brunt of HC cost for the 50% of folks no longer able to pay HC and for 10-20M illegals as well. The government, in continuing their effort to drive down the middle class, wants to take a thoroughly corrupted and broken HC system, put some lipstick on it and pass it off as a new HC plan that actually cuts cost. According to several talking heads this is the most nefarious and deceptive act of government they have witnessed. Harkin of IA let loose a string of accolades for the HC bill last evening that, IMO set a record for plain out bold face lying. It boggles the mind that our legislators, whom we elect and pay for their service, can demonstrate before the world, such outright deception. Why can congressperson’s not just debate an issue, speak truth to it, vote on it and let that be it? Tautology requires that I say it’s the influence of special interest, aka the Corpocracy pulling their strings.
Therefore, I want congress to do nothing, pass nothing, until a reform movement can take place and free our government from the tentacles of the Corpocracy. Long live the 2nd Am. Revolution. Long live the RSP. Lou Dobb’s for President! (which would mean the demise of the RSP, but so be it.)

Otherwise, we have the government we deserve.

More depravity in government furnished by the Wash Post today. Says the US gov is sharing sensitive intelligence and computer technology, military hardware and US know-how to train and vet Mexican agents in the war on drugs. Mex is using US gov software to build Platform Mexico, a computer network housed in a five story bunker in Mex City. The network will connect Mex and US law enforcement data bases. This new relationship goes well beyond the $1.4B Merida Initiative, a 3 year agreement to provide Black Hawks and other hardware. Mex authorities are now extraditing druggies to the US for trial and incarceration. Yes, we get to pay for it all. Thousands of folks, US and foreign, stretched around the world working the drug problem and then bring them here for trial and incarceration (feeding/HC). Just one more way of moving taxpayer monies into foreign hands in the busting up of the middle class. The gov won’t secure the S. border and won’t inspect trucks carrying the drugs that wave their EZ pass security cards and zoom on through at 50mph. ‘Just too many cars ya know, and would cost a lot of overtime, ya know’. But, they will spend some billions to provide a tip off network so the druggies will know what US intelligence knows. Truth is, drugs is one of the largest US businesses, ripe with unaccountable cash. Truth is, the drug business works well for busting up the middle class. Shameful, depraved.

Otherwise, we have the government we deserve.

David

The problem with health care is the expense. It is a political victory for the Democrats if they can pass something they call health care. But unless it controls the cost, it won’t be good for America.

We don’t know what a final bill will look like. But there is no talk of tort reform or real cost controls. Instead the Democrats are searching for various new ways to tax. Shifting the burden onto some to give benefits to others can be good politics, but it is not good policy.

So you correctly identify the problem - health care in becoming more and more expensive. The Democratic plan does nothing to address that problem and may, in fact, raise costs.

Shifting the cost just…shifts the cost. We need to reduce it. The Democrats in Congress and the President are solving the wrong problem.

C: “But unless it controls the cost, it won’t be good for America. “

True enough. If Obama could write the bill and pass it on his own vote, it would control costs and drive them down. But, that is not the case. Your and my representatives want to add to the reform measures which will buy them reelection back home. So, compromises and bartering, and concessions are distorting, constricting, and diminishing the kind of reform Obama initially called for.

Perfection in health care reform is not possible. The best our current political system can do is pass a partially effective health care reform package and hope that the electorate demands changes to it going forward using an anti-incumbent promise on election day, that will force enough politicians to meet the test of driving down health care costs in the long run as subsequent changes.

Tort Reform will come after. You Republicans keep wanting to throw more and more other issues into the health care reform bill to kill it, like anti-abortion measures, and tort reform, and even greater windfalls to the insurance companies than are already contained in the proposals.

So, far, such tactics have failed, thank goodness. Ironic that Republicans think 2000 pages is too complex, as they call for more and more measures to be added. Senate Republicans will be throwing out many dozens if not hundreds of amendments in coming weeks to further add to and complicate the reform package. Hopefully, those too will fail. These are delaying and obfuscating tactics.

Tort reform needs to be addressed in legislation of its own. Just as energy independence and energy policy needs to be addressed in a bill of its own. Even though there are health care cost savings to be enjoyed by passing effective energy independence and cost cutting measures to be achieved by the nation.

Christine, tort reform would account for less than 1% of the projected cost increases in health care costs going forward. It is Republicans who are focused on the wrong priorities and issues. Democrat’s Insuring 30 million Americans instead of the 3 million Republicans propose helping, will save far more lives and improve quality of life for millions more people. Republicans say they are pro-life, but vote anti-life and anti-quality life when it comes policy reforms that will actually save lives and improve quality of life for 10 times more of the current uninsured. They choose corporate insurance profitability over life and life quality, instead. Hypocrites!

David
Barack Obama is my president too and I hope he can succeed, but you seem a little infected with hagiography for the man than is warranted. If he could write the law, I doubt that he would address tort reform. If it is not passed now, I don’t believe it will pass ever. The Republicans tried to pass tort reform and were stopped by Democratic opposition and defections in their own ranks. The Democrats oppose tort reform.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the savings at $54 billion over a decade. Consulting firm Tillinghast Towers-Perrin has suggested the direct cost of medical tort litigation is more like $30 billion annually. PriceWaterhouseCoopers estimates that last year $240 billion in health expenditures were the result of doctors ordering unnecessary procedures to protect against the risk of lawsuits. link
This may seem small money to you, and it may be a relatively small % of the monumental health care bill, but it is big enough to address. It would be good to save that $240 billion. It would be the only thing that really saves money in this health care debate.

David:

Thank you for an article about Health care reform.

I don’t really consider what we are doing now as health care reform but really more of an expansion of entitlement programing.

I don’t like the budget numbers because they are a slight of hand. The cost should be calculated from the date of first benefit and going forward, which I have been told is somehere near $2.5 Trillion.

Liberals made and won a debate that the wealthy’s income and networth have risen far more than the rest of us, and thus should see the Bush tax cuts reversed, and those dollars used for healthcare for the uninsured. In the end they will probably get this.

However, I believe that fundamental health care reform starts after the bill is passed. Once this momentum from this liberal argument is finished, and the ink is dry, we still will be faced with the fact that we pay 16% of gdp on healthcare which is twice that of our trading partners, and if we don’t fix it we will be looking at extremely serious consequences.

Let me give you one that I’m not sure you and I have debated. (Maybe you have and if so I apologize). Look at California right now with it’s high tax rates. At UCLA they increased tuition by 30%!!! In the future we are looking at a negative snowball if education funding is sqeezed and we end up with a generation with far fewer college graduates. Our future needs to be vested in making college more accessable not the other way around.

So here we are looking at the unisured of whom many are the young. On the one hand we appear to be giving them health insurance (a good thing!!) on the other hand in many quarters a college education is going to be much harder to achieve.

I think that fundamental health care reform is a must and likely will not start until the day after this current bill is signed into law. Fundamental healthcare reform to me would show a curve that over the next 20 years would make health care costs competitive with our trading partners.

Well, The government promised to control immigration after Regan and they didn’t. The government could control the drug flow across the S. border, something like 30-45B yearly , but they don’t. They’ve had 30 years to control Medicare fraud and they didn’t, but now they think they can.
A failed government in every aspect.

Otherwise, we have the government we deserve.

Yes, Roy,

The military could occupy the Mexican border, But that will not stop the drug inflow. Prohibition doesn’t work. China executed drug smugglers on the spot. Why are you advocating for totalitarian control? That is the only system that has ever controlled it’s borders completely. Is that the government you want?

Craig,

Thanks for a concise and positive post. I agree with most of what you said.

This is also the real political issue to me, our competitive disadvantage.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) released a merged version of the Senate comprehensive reform on 11/19/09, which Mike Oliphant whom manages Utah health insurance plans for http://www.benefitsmanager.net/selecthealth.html employers could get behind and support some of it (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or H.R. 3590). This should encourage the private sector health insurance carriers to form INSURANCE EXCHANGES which is what we have done here in Utah. They carry the risk and burden, not the tax payer. See more about this at www.utahhealthplans.info

Craig, very good points, all.

And I agree, some of the needed reforms will come after this bill is signed into law, and are not contained in the bill, though others are.

The decision to provide health insurance to those who want and need it in America is monumental and reflects the liberals pro-life stance counter to the conservatives who are pro-life on health insurance only if you can afford to pay their supporters for it, otherwise, do with out and suffer or die.

Yes, how to bring the costs down. First and foremost, eliminate as far as possible, false positive testing. I went to a cardiologist a few months ago, and was told I have a heart problem, and need a nuclear stress test. Took the expensive test, wasted half a day, and the results showed a 60% blockage in one or more of my coronary arteries.

I didn’t trust the results, and went for second opinion to another cardiologist who ordered an angiogram, a more definitive test at a somewhat higher cost than the nuclear imaging stress test. Result, my heart is fit as a fiddle and there is no blockage.

End result, the somewhat higher cost test was the least costly to all concerned, had it been ordered first and in place of the nuclear stress test. False positive testing is enormously expensive and independent review boards need to be established who can oversee and regulate standard practices to insure lowest cost methodologies without sacrificing very high and reliable quality results.

And they need the power to revoke licenses. A very small percentage of medical personnel account for a very large percentage of the malpractice suits. And administrative fines need to be imposed where medical personnel are reported to be doing the stupid.

Example: I had a cancer tumor removed by a surgeon. The stupid surgeon didn’t mark the orientation of the excised tissue sample N, S, E, W before sending it to the pathology lab. Pathology lab reports back all the tumor may not have been removed as carcinoma cells we still found at one edge of the excised tissue.

The surgeon, for his own stupidity, could not now determine which side of the wound needed further tissue removal and therefore, my wound was doubled in size on all sides, when only a small amount of tissue needed to be removed from only one side of the wound.

Now here’s the kicker, because the above scenario doesn’t reflect wasted health care dollars, as it stands. When I first went to the surgeon, I did my homework, and told the surgeon my resarch indicated that the Moh’s microsurgery procedure was rated as the most effective with the least chance of recurrence of cancer. This procedure involves doing the pathology on the tissues in the O.R. as it is removed. The surgeon assured me this was not necessary.

Turned out, he got paid for two entirely separate surgical procedures as did all the other medical providers where one would have done the trick. Why do in one surgery what you can charge for two, right?

My point is, there needs to be a review board I can go to, to submit this fact set to, and expect that review board to have the authority to administer fines, rebukes and warnings, or even revoke licenses, if patient complaints are found to be justified, and order remuneration of patient costs where the patient was determined to have been bilked for unnecessary dollars.

This is a very different system than law suit litigation, and for Constitutional purposes, may have to be authorized within the court system, but, it would constitute an effective alternative to law suits for a host of persons mistreated.

Christine, sorry, but your comment is patently wrong in saying Democrats do not want tort reform. They do. What they don’t want is the Republican brand of tort reform which essentially amounts to a get out of jail free card for corporate and business wrong doers, and would eliminate class action suits, which can address whole industry practices (e.g. tobacco industry).

Democrats are working on independent administrative review boards as one idea, patient’s courts staffed by independent health care professionals who stand to gain nothing from the results of their decisions.

Tort reform which lacks the power to alter the course of monopolistic and oligopoly behaviors which are clearly harmful to the public, is not the answer. But, that is, in several ways, the tort reform Republicans are advocating.

Any discussion of tort reform must begin with the acceptance of the fact that any grievance address system put in place will not be perfect, and can only act after the fact of malfeasance. Therefore, for as effective a tort system as possible, reform must begin with oversight and regulation which can act prophylactically.

Republicans, on philosophical grounds, oppose oversight and regulation by government, but, it has been demonstrated time and again, that industry insider oversight and regulation fails the public and consumers, again and again.

There will be tort reform offered by Democrats. But, Republicans won’t vote for it. Sound familiar? What’s needed, and what our political system can no longer provide, is a reform that will not be strengthened and weakened with the ebb and flow of political party majority status in Congress and the White House.

How to design tort reform, fairly immune from the political forces over time?. That is the question that first and foremost, must be answered. Otherwise, tort reform will be a waste of government effort and American tax dollars as any long term solution.

Start with academics overseeing malfeasance review, I would suggest. Retirees, persons in the academic specialty field who have retired from the field, would be a good start. This helps insure they have no conflict of interest and more immune from pressure from peer professionals in the field. Professors of engineering to review torts involving engineering disasters, professors teaching nursing and medicine specializations to review health care torts.

Let’s start there. But, Republicans will oppose such common sense objective and unaffiliated approaches, I suspect. Republicans know who funds their party and campaigns, and will insist on the legislative ability to repay those contributors in the laws that are passed or opposed by Republicans. Ignoring entirely that this is a national issue for all Americans which threatens the viability of our nation going forward.

David:

First of all, that is a lot of health care. I am thankful for your recovery!

I would like to put a target on healthy future 60 to 70 year olds. If we do not have extra money and are in fact way behind, I am going to say that morally future healthy sixty somethings can have their social security and medicare benefits reduced in order to invest in the young.

For instance, I will argue that in a time of scarcity, it is more moral to invest limited resources in education and job training than it is to invest in healthy citizens in their sixties.

I want to single this out in two ways. First of all, no current benefit cuts, because retirees do not have time to plan since their plans are already made.

Second. Some have disability issues, and I would excude those with any medical problems.

So I would argue that it is morally fine to talk to those who are healthy and 55 and younger, and tell them that we are going to have an open debate to discus lack of future resources, and that future benefit cuts are coming.

I would further argue that this can be the moral thing to do, if our reasons are to protect the fiscal system from collapse and to prevent cuts in education and job training for your young people. As an example I would offer what happened in California this last week when there were protests because of 30% increases in tuition.

30% increases in tuition if this catches on will damage our nations future, and will damage future retirement benefits by eliminated many students from a college education. Study after study shows that educational attainment is one way to predict future earnings growth which results in more tax revenue.

We literally have a gun to our head. It is either cut future benefits now when we have some control, or cut benefits later when our children may lack job skills to produce the income to produce the tax revenue to support us in the future.

Our choices are literally cut now while we have some control and can respond proactively with our personal planning, or have them cut later when we have no response time because we are already retired.

We also need not fear this process. My father and mother retired at 62. Since that time, longevity has risen by three years. If I were to get an early retirment at 65, (three years later) I would still have the same number of years in retirement.

David:

One more thought. When I was on the a School Board I discovered a tactic for “getting things gone”. There are these issues in organizations that circle and circle and circle. (Like entitlements).

What I would do is announce that in “X” number of time I was going to make a motion. I would use the best information I had at the time and truely make my best recommendation. The problem is that until the community believes that you are really going to do something this time everyone holds back.

Once I made the motion for course there were usually better ideas that prevailed because forcing the motion brought everyone to the table. Then when the better idea “arrived” I would simply drop my idea and take on theirs!!

Sometimes we would step on it as a Board and only after we made a decision did the community come with pitforks in hand swinging ropes etc. Of course I was curious to know where everyone was when we were deliberating. I think they really didn’t believe we were really going to do something.

Still no problem, now that we had every ones attention, we had all the infomation and players at the table and we would revisit the issue and move along.

I called this decisions “swishers” and “bank shots”. If we were dumb lucky and got it right the first time I called them “swushers” or “swishers”. If it took two decisions (or more) I called the “bank shots”. At the end of the day who cares? The community could move forward.

With the current issue of entitlement spending, if it were truely on the agenda to cut future benefits for retirees, it might be amazing how many other cost cutting ideas were to abound. Once America were to realize that decision makers were serious and action was going to happen creativity would abound. If there is a better idea, who cares? As long as the issue is resolved and our nation’s fiscal picture is put on a sustainable path.

Excellent story, Craig, and good point.

Yes, interesting post Craig. I never paid any attention to politics at all until about two years ago. I guess they have lied to the public forever, or misled them might be a kinder term. But, it would be nice to have government talk straight to the people. Talk to the new world order and why it is necessary to downsize healthcare and every other entitlement program. Why it is necessary that we import 10% of the Mexican population in the middle of a recession? Glen Beck said several times this evening “people are looking for someone to talk the truth”. Why not expound on the virtues of an NAU rather than trying to back door it in hopes the people want realize whats going on until its too late to do anything about it? Lying has become acceptable in politics, media, advertising, religion, ad infinitum.
Oh well, not a sermon, just a thought.

Craig, two points.

First, there is no comparison between a school board and the entire population of the U.S. The media doesn’t reach most people in a School Board district with School Board news. Not that they don’t publish it, but, few in the Community read it and ask what it means to them.

That is not the case with the American public and federal government in this regard. Those vast millions who don’t follow the news in the media, nonetheless, acquire news from the media through their social circles, “Hey, John, did you hear that Obama is going to sell America to the Chinese as a way to pay off the national debt in order to get himself reelected?”

Second point. Contrary to Faux News, entitlements are respected and appreciated by a vast majority of those receiving them, and nearly all Americans will receive them in their lifetime. Ergo, there is no majority in America calling for an end or drastic cuts to entitlement benefits.

What there is, in fact, is a majority calling for ways to make these safety nets affordable for the long run. Pose the question in a poll, “If Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare could be continued as affordable and sustainable public policy, would you want to see these programs continued?”

Majority will say yes. It is in their own enlightened self-interest to say yes.

Which begs the question: Are there options going forward which would permit these programs to continue without bankrupting the federal government and without large increases in middle and lower class taxes or radical reductions in benefits?

That is the political question which has not been definitively answered yet, and until it is, the majority will continue to call for sustaining these programs they have invested in while reducing the cost to continue them.

Craig,

I think part of the problem lies in the flap over the breast screening issue.

Of course, all medicine is personal, but just stating the fact that there isn’t much benefit for screening 40 year olds brought out a torrent of rage.

My cardiologist wants me to take blood thinners, anti cholesterol drugs, aspirin, etc, etc. I take the aspirin, but several studies have shown anti cholesterols to be of little effectiveness. I’d be spending probably a few thousand on prescriptions, if I took his advice. It’s been five years since my heart attack …. ackkk …. arrrrghhh!…. Just kidding!