Quote of the Day: Are Barack Obama and the Democrats Incompetent?
Our Quote of the Day comes from Glenn Reynolds, who quotes from a Robert Reich column where the former Clinton administration Labor Secretary criticizes Obama and the Democrats for not having an actual healthcare plan in place which then left an opening for health care protesters.
Reynolds writes:
Remember how Bush was supposed to be the idiot who went into Iraq without a plan, while Obama was supposed to be the cool methodical one? But Reich is admitting that despite all the Administration hoopla, there’s still no plan. Or, possibly, that the White House has a plan, but won’t tell us what it is. And yet the people who don’t want to see a bill — some bill, doing who-knows-what — rammed through in the dead of night are somehow the ones who are ignorant and being manipulated. Right.
Read his entire post.
And Reynolds has a point. Healthcare reformers are showing faith in what will emerge…but there is no solid plan in place yet. Its opponents are saying they don’t trust what the Democrats and government will do and since there is no specific solid plan out with tons of details (and chronicled by the media), it makes it easier for people to protest what they think is in it.
One thing is for sure: it’s highly unlikely future policies will be created this way again. Bill and Hillary Clinton may have erred in creating their detailed plan, hammered out in private in the White House, and then dumping it on a Congress that picked it apart until it died and dealt a major blow to Bill Clinton politically and relegated Hilly Clinton to a more traditional first lady role. But the Obama approach — give the broad outlines to Congress and let them hammer it out in committees — was clearly a political bungle. Even if it passes in some form, this isn’t a method that will be cloned. At the least, there will have to be some (serious) fine-tuning.
There is also a growing sense among the new and old media punditry that the Obama political team is perhaps NOT as astute as many hoped and others feared. It’s not exactly Amateur Hour — but it’s sloppy.
And Obama & Co are paying a price.
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Sure they have a plan, it's called “change the current plan” That plan is to gouge paying customers as much as possible in premiums and then when they get sick to act as quickly as possible to deny as much coverage as possible to them.
Obama's plan is to find a way to charge the least amount to either the taxpayer or single-payer in order to competely cover them as soon as they get sick. And even better to provide cheap services to prevent their illness altogether. Obama et al's plan is to insert the opposite system which is why MedMob is whining like little schoolgirls about to have their lollipop taken away.
In short, Obama's plan is to take profiteering out of human health. And BOY they don't like it at all.
The fine details are being hashed out now of how to do just that. Or haven't people been paying attention to that. This just feels like another angle the MedMob is trying to denigrate a good cause Obama is behind.
“Healthcare reformers are showing faith in what will emerge…but there is no solid plan in place yet.”
Four out of five committees, no?
“it makes it easier for people to protest what they think is in it.”
That seems to be the logic for some – since some rubes are afraid of boogeymen, the democrats should be nervous.
I think it's a bipartisan problem. Obama and the democrats haven't chipped their teeth properly on something this big and contestable for a long time, and the republicans are completely psychotic.
Ditto that also Kastanj. Psychotic with greed to the point that they watch their brothers fall all around them while counting the gold they made from their demise. It makes me want to puke.
I don't know that the concept of giving Congress a broad outline and letting them hammer out the specifics is a bad one, the problem is the broad outline Obama provided can't be done – insure everybody, nobody changes doctors or plans they like, don't increase the deficit, close the doughnut hole, get rid of pre-existing condition limitations and don't raise taxes. In that sense I think Obama is as much disingenuous as incompetent. Did he really expect them to come up with a plan?
I have listened to several of Obama's town halls and it's all pie-in-the-sky best case scenario stuff. His plan is fine on the benefit side but very weak on the fiscal and pragmatic sides.
Yes, they can be done. Taxing things that are proven to be bad for human health and promote diseases like alcoholism, schirrosis, death by auto-accident, lung, throat, face and mouth cancer from tobacco products and rampant epidemic diabetes and obesity is the answer. Add to that streamlining costs really reasearching procedural costs and actual costs of manufacturing drugs and setting reasonable profit levels for those products vs the killing [literally] being made today. Then you consolidate patient references on a computer system that is backed up by a paper trail so in-clinic visits provide instant access to what would've been two or three phone calls, paper shuffles and lost information in the past.
Basically the MedMob will cry foul that their procedural and pharmacy profits shouldn't be tampered with in a “free-market” society. However, human life doesn't come with a handy sliding-scale price tag. It is a basic right to have access to affordable health care. And the word “affordable” and “free market” don't coexist where malignant capitalism wants to be trusted with morality and human decency. They have in fact proven they are not at all to be trusted here. And hence the debate.
It's a little nagging issue they don't want a lot of coverage on BTW, how we wouldn't even be discussing these issues if they hadn't already trampled us to death with their audacious amoral greed.
They are incompetent, evil, angry clowns led by an illegal alien calling WE THE PEOPLE names. They have had their moment in the sun, their last act is over and soon the curtain is going to fall.
As usual, Camille Paglia says it best:
Obama seems to be surrounded by juvenile tinhorns, bumbling mediocrities and crass bully boys.
Case in point: the administration's grotesque mishandling of healthcare reform, one of the most vital issues facing the nation. Ever since Hillary Clinton's megalomaniacal annihilation of our last best chance at reform in 1993 (all of which was suppressed by the mainstream media when she was running for president), Democrats have been longing for that happy day when this issue would once again be front and center. But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises — or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama's aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.
I prefer to see Nancy continue to make a fool of herself on a bi-weekly basis. Otherwise, Camille makes perfect sense,
Kastanj:
the republicans are completely psychotic.
Don't project your own mental condition onto others….
Ditto to Silhouette! Your silly Marxist tropes are hilarious and confer the term “useful idiot” onto you and Kastanj, though you both operate from fixed ideas and received opinions. From all the wrong places!!
“Obama's aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts”
Actually, it has passed four out of five committees. So Paglia, like almost all anti-reform people, is merely impersonating a person who thinks.
It's all fear basically. Republicans used fear to get what they wanted and are now using fear to stop something they are ideologically opposed to. In short, they don't belong in this millennium, and neither does the people that abide them.
The fear is definitely working on me. I've had my own individual health plan for over 30 years, it's been affordable, provided lots of choices, never denied a claim (and yes, it's had plenty of chances), involves zero bureaucracy, lots of freedom, and I like it.
I listened to a telephonic town hall with my congressman, and he promised that people who liked their plans would be able to keep them. Fine. Except yesterday I got an email from the Obama campaign (yes, he won, but the campaign is still sending me daily emails), and it says that under his plan, there will be no deductibles, required full coverage for preventive care, no premium discrimination on the basis of age or gender, and no “discrimination for preexisting conditions.” That is not my plan.
My plan doesn't allow people to wait until they get sick to sign up, just like my homeowners insurance company doesn't let people wait until the house is on fire to sign up, and my car insurance company doesn't let people buy insurance coverage for wrecks they've already had. I like that. It makes sense to me. Some of those would-be freeloaders probably have good excuses, but most of them were just irresponsible and now want to horn in on coverage they weren't willing to pay for.
My plan has a high deductible. That's what keeps it affordable, makes me think twice and three times about whether I really need to go to the doctor, and keeps me in a pool of like-minded consumers of health care services – the kind who don't over-utilize. I know that hypocondriacs (excuse me, those suffering from somatoform disorders) won't be exhausting the funds needed to cover whatever serious diseases I may get. They'll be buying the plans with no or low deductibles and paying accordingly. I like that.
My plan doesn't cover preventive care. It's an insurance policy – for unpredictable risks beyond what I can plan and budget for – not a pre-paid health plan. I like that. An insurance policy is just what I wanted. Pre-paid health care plans are inclined to get aggressive about managing my life in order to keep their costs down. I prefer to manage my own life.
My plan has lower premiums for young people and higher for old people, higher for women than for men, higher for smokers than for non-smokers. Even though I'm closer to old than young, and I'm female, I like that. It makes sense that heavier users of a service should pay a higher price, and it makes it more reasonable for a young person to sign up, because the cost of the premium is rationally related to the services they will demand. Paradoxically, that discrimination actually increases the pool of premium-payers to my ultimate benefit.
In other words, I like my plan just the way it is, which isn't surprising since I'm the one who picked it out. And no, I clearly will not be allowed to keep my plan. I may be allowed to keep a plan with the same name, but like one of the pod-people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it will not really be my plan, and it will cost me (or someone) a ton of money that will be entirely wasted.
So, yes, I'm afraid. And since most insured Americans also like their plans and most Americans are insured, lots of Americans are very rationally afraid. It's crystal clear to us that we will not be better off under ObamaCare. If the people whose lives will be improved by this plan are allowed to express their selfish interests, why are we supposed to just shut up about ours?