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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (314915)	7/15/2009 2:46:53 PM
From: TideGlider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793843

It should be the Secretary of State or similar position in any given state that places the candidate on the ballot.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (314915)	7/15/2009 4:28:15 PM
From: KLP	5 Recommendations Respond to of 793843

Tough Observation from AJS: I Think Our President Has Lost His Mind Published by AJStrata under All General Discussions strata-sphere.com We have witnessed since January how liberal naiveté has applied the wrong government medicine and treatments to an ailing job market, making things worse than anyone would have expected. Obama and his liberal allies in Congress claimed they wanted to ’stimulate’ the economy to create jobs and this had to be done right away. But they implemented a federal pork spending program which had no ability to spend money right away. It was smoke and mirrors which has now been cleared from our sight, since everyone in DC now admits there never was meant to be any near term stimulus. They lied and now claim it was us who misunderstood. Fool me once, shame on you. In fact, the only thing the Obama-Pelosi-Ried stimulus experiment did do was create a mind boggling $1.84 trillion national deficit this year (projected from the $1.086 trillion we hit in June). The Treasury Department said Monday that the deficit in June totaled $94.3 billion, pushing the total since the budget year started in October to $1.09 trillion. The administration forecasts that the deficit for the entire year will hit $1.84 trillion in October. strata-sphere.com That is some amazing skill there, to bankrupt this nation and have nothing to show for it. Now the liberals in DC, sensing they are already running out of time on their agenda as their support begins to slip, have decided to destroy our health care system and replace it with one that has a simple premise: cheaper is better. As many have noted elsewhere, the ideal liberal health care system is one of rationed, government-run care where it can take months to be seen and have your medical condition addressed. In the UK people have died waiting for treatment and Canada ships many of its tougher cases to the US every year. They are the model for the DC liberals. The Obamacare approach was summed up by Obama himself when he noted this: President Obama suggested at a town hall event Wednesday night that one way to shave medical costs is to stop expensive and ultimately futile procedures performed on people who are about to die and don’t stand to gain from the extra care. Under Obamacare, only the strong and rich will survive. But it will be cheaper! How does Obama rationalize the incredibly expensive take over of private health care insurance by putting up a tax payer funded, government run system to drive out the private companies during a time of massive deficits, low revenues and economic hell? By promising more deficits, lower revenues and more economic hell: Obama issued a statement praising the House plan. At a time when health-care costs are “crushing businesses and families and placing an unsustainable burden on governments,” he said, “key committees in the House of Representatives have engaged in unprecedented cooperation to produce a health-care proposal that will lower costs, provide better care for patients and ensure fair treatment of consumers by the health-care industry.” Who is this guy kidding? Does he think Americans are really that dumb? Let’s take the first part of this pretzel logic: “At a time when health-care costs are “crushing businesses and families and placing an unsustainable burden on governments ..” Health care costs are what they are. They are not going to go downward out of some magical wand waving. The way to reduce costs is to reduce what we pay people in the medical industries and professions to do their jobs. We would need to pay them less to make heart valves, pay them less to make defibrillators, pay them less to be nurses, pay them less to process insurance claims, pay them less to be doctors, ay them less to create new drugs. People are paid to provide health care - from the doctors and nurses to the creators of all the amazing life saving devices and treatments to the people who manage the paperwork and clean the buildings. Medicine is an expensive necessity. It does not come in a fast-food option. But the liberals in DC are offering just that - a fast food (read cheap) health care system! The only way to reduce costs is to cut them, which means lowering the money we pay people, which means lowering the skill levels and/or number of jobs: About half of the costs of the legislation will be paid for through reforms and savings in Medicare and Medicaid, including eliminating $156 billion in overpayments to private Medicaid Advantage plans over 10 years. Brilliant - cut the what the payment on services, which means rationed or fewer services. Obama and the Dems think they can wave their magic liberal fairy wands and all of sudden Medicare and Medicaid will be cheaper? Not likely. What will happen is fewer people will offer services under these plans, leaving the people high and dry. Right now the government pays a fraction of the costs required under government plans like Medicare and Medicaid. The only way for companies to offset their losses on government plans is to raise the price of the non-government plans. Basically, one big reason medical insurance premiums are so high on Americans now is we are covering the dead beats in DC who promised all this cheap healthcare, but would not fund it. If the government has to actually pay full value for healthcare it means putting a burden on companies and individuals in the form of taxes, or rationing care. The new Democrat plan is to impose a surtax on small businesses and sole proprietors - calling them ‘rich’ as the dems always do. All this does is pull money out of the one sector of the economy that is key to creating jobs. It has the obvious result - no new jobs. But that is not enough. To pay for this we also need to reduce the salaries of people in the health care industries, we need to choke off job creation from small businesses. Remember, the Dems promise it will all cost less. But even this will not cover the full costs by any stretch of the imagination. So to top it all off we as a nation will be going further and further into never-before-seen levels of debt. Either that or ration the health care dollars. So let’s summarize the liberal plan, shall we? Those in the health care industries will see their salaries or jobs shrunk, small businesses will not be hiring because of the surtaxes, health care will be rationed and the best care will be only available to the richest few, and we will sink into deeper debt. But there will be reduced burden on families because our health care will be cheaper. Seems to be a plan just like that whacky job stimulus bill the liberals sold this country in January. All big promises which have no chance of coming true. Fool me twice? Not likely. Update: I want to note some insightful comments from Michael Barone: Obama was also content to let Waxman and Edward Markey write the House cap-and-trade bill. To get needed votes, they gave away carbon credits to politically connected businesses rather than sell them by auctions whose revenues Obama planned to use to finance health care. And they included potentially embarrassing provisions, like one regulating the efficiency of candelabra base lamps. Better be prepared to face the federal candelabra inspectors. Such are the people whom we are asked to trust to reshape the provision of health care. They are struggling to amass the votes to establish a government health insurance plan whose transparent purpose is to drive private insurers out of business and impose one-size-fits-all health care on the bulk of Americans. They already inserted into the stimulus package a provision funding “comparative effectiveness research,” which purports to show what treatments are medically effective and cost-effective. But comparative effectiveness research is, if not junk science, not a fully developed intellectual enterprise. Medicine is an art as well as a science, and comparative effectiveness research may too often compare apples and oranges. Meanwhile, as Europeans know, the most effective way to squeeze out costs, as Obama promises, is denial of care. Hip replacement at 60? Hey, that’s expensive, and you’re too old. Do we really want to let the Dems do to the Health Care industry what they did to Chrysler and GM Dealerships? Update: At least the Dems have brought back the genius of Rube Goldberg devices. The GOP have charted the Democrat plan, and it looks on paper even worse than it sounds.