Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
In October, when Republicans were trying to de-fund or delay Obama-care, Democrats said: Republicans hate poor people. They want them to die. That’s why Republicans don’t want my friend, Poor Crippled Timmy, to OBTAIN medical insurance to pay for medical care. In the face of that vicious onslaught, week-kneed Republicans caved.
Confident prediction: in January, when the temporary continuing spending resolution expires and Republicans are hinting at de-funding or delaying Obama-care, Democrats will say: Republicans hate poor people. They want them to die. That’s why Republican don’t want poor people like my friend, Poor Crippled Timmy, to RETAIN the Obama-care medical insurance he just obtained to pay for his medical care. In the face of that vicious onslaught, week-kneed Republicans will cave, again.
Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, John McCain and all the other Republicans desperately trying to find a way to placate the Republican base and also appease the Democrats in Congress, here’s a news flash: Democrats hate you. They hated you in the past, they hate you now, and they will hate you in the future. Their friends at the New York Times and the Star Tribune hate you, too. No matter what you do, what you say, what bribe you give them, they will say bad things about you, attribute to you the most wicked motives and refuse to compromise with you.
Once you accept that, you have a choice: stay and abandon your principles; stay and fight for your principles; or quit.
One of these choices makes you a Republican. The others make you a weasel. Pick one.
Joe Doakes
It’s time for a reference to Berg’s Law – in this case, Berg’s Eleventh, which comes to the fore at campaign time:
Berg’s Eleventh Law of Inverse Viability: The conservative liberals “respect” for their “conservative principles” will the the one that has the least chance of ever getting elected. Here are all the references I could find to Berg’s 11th Law.
The McCain Corollary To Berg’s Eleventh Law: If that respected conservative ever develops a chance of getting elected, that “respect” will turn to blind unreasoning hatred overnight.
The Huckabee Corollary the McCain Corolloary To Berg’s Eleventh Law: The Republican that the media covers most intensively before the nomination for any office will be the one that the liberals know they have the best chance of beating after the nomination, and/or will most cripple the GOP if nominated.
The Reagan Corollary To The Huckabee Corollary the McCain Corollary To Berg’s Eleventh Law: The Media and Left (pardon the redundancy) will try to destroy the conservative they are most afraid of.
More on that later today.
“In the face of that vicious onslaught, week-kneed Republicans will cave, again.”
It is a strategy that sets the GOP up for failure. The fact that it is an unachievable goal has absolutely nothing to do with it I suppose…..
I bet you would have been a kick at Valley Forge, Emery.
Oh, wait, you are a Canadian Tory, aren’t you? Not a lot of revolutionary spirit north of the 49th parallel.
Let’s not forget that most of the ideas behind Obamacare came from the Heritage Foundation, a Republican think tank as a response to the proposed Hillarycare in 1993-94.
If Republicans had had the courage to embrace their own ideas, rather than surrendering them to the Democrats, they might well control the White House and Congress now.
The point you’re missing, Emery, is Republicans REJECTED the Heritage plan. They don’t need to “own” a failed proposal nor apologize for it.
Heritage developed its plan in response to Hillary-care which was far more draconian (doctors were forbidden to practice outside the system, for example). Heritage was doing the “us-too-only-less” thing that RINOs typically do but the Republican party REJECTED it then, and they REJECTED it now. So stop trying to blame them for ideas they have never embraced and focus on the fact that Democrats have been trying to kill the medical industry for decades.
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Insurance Marketplaces have always been a conservative “free-market” based idea. Mr Pawlenty endorsed this vary same insurance marketplace concept while he was Governor. Finger in the wind ideological turnabouts have more to do with the political winds, rather than core concepts and principles. Don’t get me wrong, I am no fan of the ACA. It’s a huge transfer of wealth from the young to the (subsidized) boomers.
We would do ourselves a tremendous favor if we separated medical services into those whose impact on life expectancy is high, which should be fully funded by the government, and those whose impact is low, where government funding should be partial, means-tested, and judged relative to other quality-of-life services that the government would like to provide. Among the side benefits would be that we would spend a larger fraction of our tax dollars on children and adults in their productive years, investments that pay society back in greater wealth and productivity, rather than on elders in their final years, which offers society only a bottomless pit of costs. Old people live longer when they eat well, exercise their minds and bodies, and do useful things. The quality and quantity of their contact with the medical profession has little impact on how much time they have left.
Governing is about making choices. For the most part those choices are about where to spend a limited amount of money. How do you choose between housing for the homeless, resources for schooling youngsters, and healthcare for the elderly? If you decide that denying any form of healthcare for the elderly is beyond the pale because healthcare is about “human dignity”, then you’ve made your decision already, and those kids and homeless people aren’t going to get the services that they might. If, on the other hand, you want to actually govern, and make rational choices about limited resources, you have to make some judgments about where the money is best spent.
Emery, it’s clear from your comments that you understand the free market and socialism are two different things. But when it comes to solutions, you always land on the side of socialism: medical care is based according to ability to contribute to society. Using that algorithm, youth, healthy people and Democrats will get medicine; the elderly, infirm and TEA Party members will get Death Panels. Stalin himself couldn’t have devised a more socialist system.
The reason an aspirin at a hospital costs $100 is they pay union wages to licensed providers but charge what bureaucrats allow. The free market solution to lack of affordable health care is to separate delivery of services from regulation and from payment.
Can’t afford a licensed doctor? Then go to an unlicensed one. Or a nurse practitioner. Or the wise woman down the street who brews up herbal potions in her sink. Can’t afford to belong to an HMO that covers every sniffle? Then buy major medical and pay for sniffles out of pocket.
But, but, some people will get better medical care than others! Yes, and what’s your point? That’s going to happen under your proposed socialist system. It’s going to happen under the hybrid Obama-care, as patients are forced to buy policies but doctors decline to participate in the program to take private-pay patients instead, or uproot their practices to move off-shore as part of the medical tourism industry, leaving behind the doctors who can’t escape to treat the patients who can’t escape. Think “army doctor” or “prison doctor” and you’re on the track.
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The Democrats were opposed to the notion of single-payer Universal Healthcare because it would have required large new taxes and an intrusive federal bureaucracy to displace the current private payments to private providers. Large new taxes and an intrusive federal bureaucracy are exactly what people dislike about the Democratic party most. That hard lesson was learned by a generation of Democrats and they aren’t about to forget it. Single payer healthcare might well have sunk the Democratic party for a generation. Obamacare is either a good-faith effort to provide universal healthcare without a massive federal bureaucracy and tax system, or a Machiavellian scheme to ‘prove’ the need for a single payer system by the failure of a Republican-inspired alternative.