At a conference held at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization in Washington, Michael S. Greve, an A.E.I. scholar and chairman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, had this to say in reference to the Affordable Care Act:“This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene. I do not care how this is done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it. I don’t care who does it, whether it’s some court some place, or the United States Congress. Any which way, any dollar spent on that goal is worth spending, any brief filed toward that end is worth filing, any speech or panel contribution toward that end is of service to the United States.”
“Five million Americans stand to lose their subsidies if the Supreme Court rules against the ACA. Some of them have pre-existing conditions and without subsidies would find health insurance unaffordable. Others, of modest income, who finally received health care coverage after years of going without it would find themselves in jeopardy again. This would be tragic for so many Americans.” — Mary ScottTragic? For many, it would be deadly. This is indeed a life-or-death struggle, and not in a merely figurative sense. The people engaged in this effort are trying to use the courts to commit murder. And they may get away with it.
By any estimate, several thousand people will die next year through lack of timely primary care because of the refusal of many red states to expend medicare. The present efforts to kill the ACA (without replacing it with something that accomplishes the same purpose) ought to be regarded as the “reckless endangerment” of the lives of others. I wish the ACA WERE replaced, replaced by something simpler and more efficient. But rather a leaky and poorly-designed lifeboat than none at all.
Stop spout political jargon that is untrue and look at the facts:
Republicans are not against healthcare – they are against government ran healthcare because it costs far more for the same care
Republicans have offered many cost reduction ideas that literally cost nothing (like allowing insurance to compete over state lines), but the Democrats will not even allow a vote on it due to the fact that it would hurt the government ran option
Democrats are trying to keep healthcare costs high so that the poor have to turn to the government ran option so that they will continue to vote for the party of handouts instead of the party that gives a hand up – keep people dependent on the government and they will keep voting for the people that promise free
We cannot continue to make promises that we will not be able to financially sustain over time – Obamacare as structured today is the next Social Security
People that promote and spew the type of lies like in this cartoon are trying to hide the facts so that people support something that will ultimately cause our economic collapse because the people that are doing it to get votes today are not the people that will have to deal with it tomorrow
And there are of course the few “true believer” liberals that just cannot look past their ideology to realize that everything costs money and therefore you cannot give everything to everyone – i.e. they cannot look at the impact of their agenda realistically and reasonably
I suppose you feel the same way about the fire department. And BTW, whether you like it our not, people you do not know are free to vote for anyone they like, or do you object to that, too?
Consider this. If it were proven tomorrow that Obama was Christ Incarnate – the day after tomorrow all conservatives would announce that they were atheists and always had been!
Harley, I understand your hatred of Obama. Really, I do. I think everyone does.-But the question I asked was why Republicans hate the idea of people getting health care.-Hatred of Obama does not answer the question.
“So while the Democrats are spineless and won’t stand up to the republicans instead they whine about republicans not doing anything, what could they do IF they had the courage to act?”
The operative phrase here is “if they have the courage to act”. One thing that would be minimally upsetting to the party would be to propose a statute that delays implementation of parts of the plan. This would take the onus off the president’s executive order to do the same, and puts responsibility in the Congress where it belongs. It may also (but this is a long shot) blow a hole in the lawsuit that the Republicans are bringing against the White House, which would save the country lots of money and time.
If one were more adventurous, one could propose single payer, which was the original and best idea. This would appear to create a lack of a united front for the party, but adults should be smart enough to know that if the leader is mistaken, it is unwise to blindly follow the leader. At this moment, in many cases it is not an advantage for Democratic candidates to be linked to either/both ACA and/or Obama, so showing a different point of view than the president may actually help at the polls. But it would take someone who is not a go-along-to-get-along Democrat, and off the top of my head I can’t name one.
“So while I agree with you that there is plenty of blame on both sides of the aisle, is it not also true that the preponderance of blame lies on the red side?”
I will sidestep that one. Certainly the Republicans are invested in the failure of ACA; this is the main reason for the lawsuit, in my opinion. It has less to do with presidential overreach than to force the full implementation, which they believe will cause total failure (or at least popular rejection). So the goal is to force all of ACA at one time in hopes of a spectacular failure. This will greatly benefit the party, but it puts all of us at financial risk, to the point that it may throw us back into (deeper) recession. The fact that the party leaders are willing to tale this risk in a ploy to gain political power is cynical in the extreme, and this is where I have my most heartburn with Republican strategy.
But we have had so much finger-pointing and blaming that I would personally prefer that we just find a way out instead of finding who we can be angry at. We need a better system ASAP, and we cannot afford the time we will take trying to assign blame.
No doubt, the us-vs.-them mentality is tearing the very fiber of our country into shreds, and it must be stopped, even if it means driving a silver stake through Karl Rove’s heart.
But detail-wise I see this differently. To me, the disease is the rapidly-failing health-care system. The symptom is the pain that patients feel when things cost too much and outcomes are substandard. The underlying reasons are a lack of will to create an improvement.
In my practice, as in any business, things go wrong sometimes. We can determine who’s to blame and punish, and/or we can work to answer the question “How can we keep this from happening again?”
From a triage point of view, the first approach is to stop the bleeding. What do we have to do to minimize whatever damage is being caused? Then: what behaviors/structure caused this problem in the first place? Then: what can we do to make sure these behaviors/structures do not repeat?
Nowhere in there is “who is to blame?”. In this type of framework, though, the person who’s to blame knows it, and sometimes I do emphasize this to that person (in private, and with dignity). And most others know who’s to blame, as well. But they also see that no one is going to jump down their throat if they make a mistake, and they will be more willing to honestly assess their contributions going forward, working with the confidence of trust, rather than with the fear of reprisal.
As it is with politicians; if we’re paying attention, we know who is helping and who’s not. And if we’re not paying attention, no amount of screaming will make us do so.
Also, I am not a big fan of single-issue voting. If my representative serves me well on every issue except ACA, I will have to think long and hard before voting against him/her.
This is not to say you are wrong. This is only to say that I see it differently.
“If we could get all Americans, conservative, CONservative, liberal, libertarian, moderate and extreme to understand that like it or not we are in this together” Not gonna happen, at least not any time soon. The libertarian “screw you, I’ve got mine” philosophy won’t let it, and the “fiscal conservatives” seem to have forgotten basic math, that prudent investment now (when interest rates are rock-bottom) is cheaper than a catastrophe later; they’d rather skip an oil change and blame the liberals when the engine locks up. (Or, in more concrete terms, they’d rather let the infrastructure decay than do any “deficit spending” on a jobs bill to both fix it and boost the economy. That’s fiscal insanity, not fiscal conservatism!) Don’t get me wrong; I like the idea of everybody pulling together for the common good…but it’s fundamentally a good-of-the-community idea, which is anathema to the serve-the-rich modern right wing. I hate to say it, but I’m getting to be afraid that things will have to actually break before the right wing sobers up and starts sliding back toward the middle. If you want to avoid that, the best thing we can do is get the moderates to vote. Not just in presidential elections, but in local and especially primary elections. Just in Republican primaries, a solid moderate voting block would pull the Tea Party’s fangs overnight…
Harley, you’re hilarious. You say the GOP has solutions. But you can’t name ONE that has passed even the house of representatives. You say that Obama lied and you can’t keep your health insurance, and that is not REMOTELY true. If the ACA is repealed, you’ll be able to lose your health insurance, but as long as the ACA is in place, you can get health insurance, and it’ll be much cheaper than it was pre-ACA. Obamacare is doing very well. It has saved tens of thousands of lives. It has reduced the cost of insurance. Not ONE of the Republican scare stories has come true. Not. A. Single. One. Get over it, you were wrong, and you are still wrong, and you’re not man enough to admit it.
Say Rodney is right. the problem is when one can’t let facts compete with their chosen position. I had some trouble starting up, but can you imagine what the logistics of starting that kind of program?Too many democrats have started to believe fox lies and forget that under W. the price of gas was at it’s higest level, the big recession/depression happened. And in the 1st year Obama completed over 70% of his campaign promises.The GOTP has been against him from before day1, and we Never had disrespect like has been done to Obama.ACA started saving lives in blue states for quite a while, while red states continue to make it difficult for people.
@opednanceThat is what happens in a free market – companies go to where it is the most beneficial. The concept of a company cannot make money or you are getting a raw deal is wrong. Liberals look at everything as win/lose instead of looking for a win/win. If we allow companies to make money then prices will be lower, and by the way, if companies provide crumby options people will select other options. Free market works this all out when you let it instead of writing laws that prevent it for working.
Additionally – my last comment is not aimed at preventative vs. emergency care – it is referring to government based health care vs. the free market. The free market does everything cheaper than the government because of one underlying fact – they have to make money or go out of business unlike a government institution that can become as corrupt as they want and still get funded by tax payers. Name even one government agency that has been shut down due to ineffectiveness – surly you can agree that there should have at least been one agency that wasn’t needed – after all we are only human and make mistakes. But if you look at our record we must be the smartest people in the world because we never have to undo anything we put in place.
braindead Premium Member over 9 years ago
Why do Republicans hate the idea of people getting health care?
Doughfoot over 9 years ago
At a conference held at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization in Washington, Michael S. Greve, an A.E.I. scholar and chairman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, had this to say in reference to the Affordable Care Act:“This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene. I do not care how this is done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it. I don’t care who does it, whether it’s some court some place, or the United States Congress. Any which way, any dollar spent on that goal is worth spending, any brief filed toward that end is worth filing, any speech or panel contribution toward that end is of service to the United States.”
Doughfoot over 9 years ago
“Five million Americans stand to lose their subsidies if the Supreme Court rules against the ACA. Some of them have pre-existing conditions and without subsidies would find health insurance unaffordable. Others, of modest income, who finally received health care coverage after years of going without it would find themselves in jeopardy again. This would be tragic for so many Americans.” — Mary ScottTragic? For many, it would be deadly. This is indeed a life-or-death struggle, and not in a merely figurative sense. The people engaged in this effort are trying to use the courts to commit murder. And they may get away with it.
Doughfoot over 9 years ago
By any estimate, several thousand people will die next year through lack of timely primary care because of the refusal of many red states to expend medicare. The present efforts to kill the ACA (without replacing it with something that accomplishes the same purpose) ought to be regarded as the “reckless endangerment” of the lives of others. I wish the ACA WERE replaced, replaced by something simpler and more efficient. But rather a leaky and poorly-designed lifeboat than none at all.
pmaerz over 9 years ago
Stop spout political jargon that is untrue and look at the facts:
Republicans are not against healthcare – they are against government ran healthcare because it costs far more for the same care
Republicans have offered many cost reduction ideas that literally cost nothing (like allowing insurance to compete over state lines), but the Democrats will not even allow a vote on it due to the fact that it would hurt the government ran option
Democrats are trying to keep healthcare costs high so that the poor have to turn to the government ran option so that they will continue to vote for the party of handouts instead of the party that gives a hand up – keep people dependent on the government and they will keep voting for the people that promise free
We cannot continue to make promises that we will not be able to financially sustain over time – Obamacare as structured today is the next Social Security
People that promote and spew the type of lies like in this cartoon are trying to hide the facts so that people support something that will ultimately cause our economic collapse because the people that are doing it to get votes today are not the people that will have to deal with it tomorrow
And there are of course the few “true believer” liberals that just cannot look past their ideology to realize that everything costs money and therefore you cannot give everything to everyone – i.e. they cannot look at the impact of their agenda realistically and reasonably
nordwonder over 9 years ago
I suppose you feel the same way about the fire department. And BTW, whether you like it our not, people you do not know are free to vote for anyone they like, or do you object to that, too?
wellis1947 Premium Member over 9 years ago
Consider this. If it were proven tomorrow that Obama was Christ Incarnate – the day after tomorrow all conservatives would announce that they were atheists and always had been!
braindead Premium Member over 9 years ago
Harley, I understand your hatred of Obama. Really, I do. I think everyone does.-But the question I asked was why Republicans hate the idea of people getting health care.-Hatred of Obama does not answer the question.
pirate227 over 9 years ago
GOP: Party first!
I Play One On TV over 9 years ago
“So while the Democrats are spineless and won’t stand up to the republicans instead they whine about republicans not doing anything, what could they do IF they had the courage to act?”
The operative phrase here is “if they have the courage to act”. One thing that would be minimally upsetting to the party would be to propose a statute that delays implementation of parts of the plan. This would take the onus off the president’s executive order to do the same, and puts responsibility in the Congress where it belongs. It may also (but this is a long shot) blow a hole in the lawsuit that the Republicans are bringing against the White House, which would save the country lots of money and time.
If one were more adventurous, one could propose single payer, which was the original and best idea. This would appear to create a lack of a united front for the party, but adults should be smart enough to know that if the leader is mistaken, it is unwise to blindly follow the leader. At this moment, in many cases it is not an advantage for Democratic candidates to be linked to either/both ACA and/or Obama, so showing a different point of view than the president may actually help at the polls. But it would take someone who is not a go-along-to-get-along Democrat, and off the top of my head I can’t name one.
“So while I agree with you that there is plenty of blame on both sides of the aisle, is it not also true that the preponderance of blame lies on the red side?”
I will sidestep that one. Certainly the Republicans are invested in the failure of ACA; this is the main reason for the lawsuit, in my opinion. It has less to do with presidential overreach than to force the full implementation, which they believe will cause total failure (or at least popular rejection). So the goal is to force all of ACA at one time in hopes of a spectacular failure. This will greatly benefit the party, but it puts all of us at financial risk, to the point that it may throw us back into (deeper) recession. The fact that the party leaders are willing to tale this risk in a ploy to gain political power is cynical in the extreme, and this is where I have my most heartburn with Republican strategy.
But we have had so much finger-pointing and blaming that I would personally prefer that we just find a way out instead of finding who we can be angry at. We need a better system ASAP, and we cannot afford the time we will take trying to assign blame.
I Play One On TV over 9 years ago
No doubt, the us-vs.-them mentality is tearing the very fiber of our country into shreds, and it must be stopped, even if it means driving a silver stake through Karl Rove’s heart.
But detail-wise I see this differently. To me, the disease is the rapidly-failing health-care system. The symptom is the pain that patients feel when things cost too much and outcomes are substandard. The underlying reasons are a lack of will to create an improvement.
In my practice, as in any business, things go wrong sometimes. We can determine who’s to blame and punish, and/or we can work to answer the question “How can we keep this from happening again?”
From a triage point of view, the first approach is to stop the bleeding. What do we have to do to minimize whatever damage is being caused? Then: what behaviors/structure caused this problem in the first place? Then: what can we do to make sure these behaviors/structures do not repeat?
Nowhere in there is “who is to blame?”. In this type of framework, though, the person who’s to blame knows it, and sometimes I do emphasize this to that person (in private, and with dignity). And most others know who’s to blame, as well. But they also see that no one is going to jump down their throat if they make a mistake, and they will be more willing to honestly assess their contributions going forward, working with the confidence of trust, rather than with the fear of reprisal.
As it is with politicians; if we’re paying attention, we know who is helping and who’s not. And if we’re not paying attention, no amount of screaming will make us do so.
Also, I am not a big fan of single-issue voting. If my representative serves me well on every issue except ACA, I will have to think long and hard before voting against him/her.
This is not to say you are wrong. This is only to say that I see it differently.
RevBobMIB over 9 years ago
“If we could get all Americans, conservative, CONservative, liberal, libertarian, moderate and extreme to understand that like it or not we are in this together” Not gonna happen, at least not any time soon. The libertarian “screw you, I’ve got mine” philosophy won’t let it, and the “fiscal conservatives” seem to have forgotten basic math, that prudent investment now (when interest rates are rock-bottom) is cheaper than a catastrophe later; they’d rather skip an oil change and blame the liberals when the engine locks up. (Or, in more concrete terms, they’d rather let the infrastructure decay than do any “deficit spending” on a jobs bill to both fix it and boost the economy. That’s fiscal insanity, not fiscal conservatism!) Don’t get me wrong; I like the idea of everybody pulling together for the common good…but it’s fundamentally a good-of-the-community idea, which is anathema to the serve-the-rich modern right wing. I hate to say it, but I’m getting to be afraid that things will have to actually break before the right wing sobers up and starts sliding back toward the middle. If you want to avoid that, the best thing we can do is get the moderates to vote. Not just in presidential elections, but in local and especially primary elections. Just in Republican primaries, a solid moderate voting block would pull the Tea Party’s fangs overnight…
ARodney over 9 years ago
Harley, you’re hilarious. You say the GOP has solutions. But you can’t name ONE that has passed even the house of representatives. You say that Obama lied and you can’t keep your health insurance, and that is not REMOTELY true. If the ACA is repealed, you’ll be able to lose your health insurance, but as long as the ACA is in place, you can get health insurance, and it’ll be much cheaper than it was pre-ACA. Obamacare is doing very well. It has saved tens of thousands of lives. It has reduced the cost of insurance. Not ONE of the Republican scare stories has come true. Not. A. Single. One. Get over it, you were wrong, and you are still wrong, and you’re not man enough to admit it.
pam Miner over 9 years ago
Say Rodney is right. the problem is when one can’t let facts compete with their chosen position. I had some trouble starting up, but can you imagine what the logistics of starting that kind of program?Too many democrats have started to believe fox lies and forget that under W. the price of gas was at it’s higest level, the big recession/depression happened. And in the 1st year Obama completed over 70% of his campaign promises.The GOTP has been against him from before day1, and we Never had disrespect like has been done to Obama.ACA started saving lives in blue states for quite a while, while red states continue to make it difficult for people.
pam Miner over 9 years ago
I meant to say it had some problems starting up.
pmaerz over 9 years ago
@opednanceThat is what happens in a free market – companies go to where it is the most beneficial. The concept of a company cannot make money or you are getting a raw deal is wrong. Liberals look at everything as win/lose instead of looking for a win/win. If we allow companies to make money then prices will be lower, and by the way, if companies provide crumby options people will select other options. Free market works this all out when you let it instead of writing laws that prevent it for working.
Additionally – my last comment is not aimed at preventative vs. emergency care – it is referring to government based health care vs. the free market. The free market does everything cheaper than the government because of one underlying fact – they have to make money or go out of business unlike a government institution that can become as corrupt as they want and still get funded by tax payers. Name even one government agency that has been shut down due to ineffectiveness – surly you can agree that there should have at least been one agency that wasn’t needed – after all we are only human and make mistakes. But if you look at our record we must be the smartest people in the world because we never have to undo anything we put in place.
attarian over 9 years ago
Is it true that Obama is also responsible for the outbreak of Ebola, 6 decades of Cub’s futility and my cat’s fleas?