A Moderate’s View Of Health Care Reform
Mar 18th, 2010 | 28 responses
One of the fun things about being a political moderate is that you can be sure no matter what you say the odds are you’ll tick off people on both sides of the political fence. I am quite sure that this will be true as I offer some of my own thoughts on what sort of proposal should be adopted when it comes to Health Care Reform.
I am long on record as a supporter of reform and have also made clear my view is best summarized by the old Chinese proverb which states that it does not matter what color the cat is, so long as it kills mice. For me the way we get there is not as important as the outcome, an improved system to provide a healthy population.
At this stage it’s still not entirely clear what the final bill before Congress will contain. Certainly the Senate bill seems to be the foundation but with the various ideas about fixing or adjusting the legislation I’m not sure anybody knows what it will look like when (or if) it gets to the President.
But it is clear that the varied proposals can be divided into three categories:
(1) The ideas that pretty much everyone agrees on
(2) The ideas that the left really likes but the right really dislikes
(3) The ideas that the right really likes but the left really dislikes
It seems to me that the ideal compromise proposal would consist of most or all of #1 and parts of #2 and #3. It is with that package in mind that I construct my own suggestions.
One area that we need general agreement on is exactly what kind of coverage we are talking about when we discuss health care reform. There are many levels of insurance coverage from very basic to the so called Cadillac gold plated plans that provide you with free treatment for everything.
Certainly it is very important for someone to be able to go to the doctor if they have a treatable illness or injury or if they need some form of preventative care. On the other hand, if we make everything free then people are going to go to the doctor for hangnails and stubbed toes.
I’ve previously discussed my own health care issues when I compared having a case of athletes foot versus having a problem in my EKG. Certainly when I had irregularities in my heartbeat it was important for me to go to the specialist to make sure that everything was fine (which it was). But when I had athletes foot, I hardly needed to go to the doctor to have him tell me to put some lotion on it.
Similarly, if you’ve got a serious flu or cold that could pose serious health risks, it is important for you to go to the doctor for treatment. But if it’s just a basic flu or cold, we all know about staying in bed, drinking liquids, etc.
I’m not talking rationing here, but any health care reform needs to recognize the need to provide for low or no cost treatment for the important things while making the more optional treatments have some cost attached to them so that people won’t abuse the system.
This may be one area where nobody is really talking about what to do.
Moving on to those things pretty much everyone agrees on we have a number of good ideas.
- Prohibiting carriers from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions
- Requiring that all insurance plans contain coverage for preventive care, including free or low cost annual physicals.
- Prohibiting carriers from canceling coverage because someone becomes ill
- Prohibiting or limiting carriers from massive rate hikes after illness
- Banning lifetime caps on coverage
- Allowing children up to the age of 25 to remain on their parent’s policy
- Helping employers or community organizations promote wellness plans to encourage a healthier lifestyle through tax breaks and/or subsidies
These seven reforms are one that pretty much everyone agrees on so they certainly should be part of any plan.
Having looked at the areas we agree on we need to look at those areas where the left and the right disagree, which is of course the reason for all of the fighting in Congress right now. It seems to me that we can find some reasonable compromise in these areas.
Next I would like to look at some of the ideas championed by the left.
I think we absolutely have to require coverage for everyone. I know that this is a touch subject with many who say that it is the right of a person to decide whether or not to get coverage. But the truth is that nobody really does make that kind of a choice.
You may be quite sincere in saying that you are willing to accept the risks of not having coverage. But if you or a family member get sick or have an accident and you need care, the fact is you are going to do whatever is required to get that care, including using public facilities. If you do manage to pay for the coverage yourself and then reach a point where you have to choose between paying those bills and feeding your family, you are going to choose your family.
This is not a bad thing, it’s an entirely normal reaction. But it belies the argument that some people are willing to take the risk of not having coverage. The truth is that whether you do so consciously or not, you are relying on the fact that if you *need* treatment you’ll get it and that if you cannot pay for it in the long run that bankruptcy is an option.
So mandatory coverage for all is a must. That doesn’t mean you have to get a gold plated plan, you can get a fairly basic ‘get hit by a bus’ sort of plan but you have to have some sort of a plan. This will both protect society from having to bear the burden of your future treatment as well as providing a broader pool to help keep coverage costs down.
Another must that is supported by the left and often rejected by the right is having subsidies for lower income groups.
As I’ve discussed above it is in the long term best interests of society for everyone to have coverage but the fact is that not everyone can afford it. So we need to have some form of subsidy system, on a sliding scale, to provide help to those who cannot otherwise purchase coverage themselves.
This does not mean that we will provide top of the line insurance plans to everyone. There are limits to what we can afford to pay for and it is entirely reasonable to say that the subsidies should be geared to provide a basic plan to everyone who cannot afford it rather than a top of the line plan.
Of course these subsidies will cost money and therefore we need to find a way to pay for them. Not having the benefit of the CBO to calculate things for me I cannot say for sure what these subsides would cost. But I do think there could be reasonable ways to pay for them.
Requiring companies that do not provide insurance coverage to their employees to pay a penalty seems like one good step. If the companies choose to provide coverage then that may remove some people from the need for subsidies, if they do not then they help pay for the subsidies.
It will also probably be necessary to increase Medicare taxes on higher income individuals. I’m not a fan of taxes but at the same time they are the price of a civilized society and the fact is that a modest increase in the medicare tax for someone earning $ 500,000 a year is minor compared to what it would be for a family earning $ 50,000. This could also be part one of the process to repair the Medicare system, a process that will also probably require phasing out some benefits for higher income individuals.
Finally I see no reason that those who make money off of the health care system (IE the insurance industry, drug companies, etc) should not share in the cost of this system. My proposals do not involve a public option or single payer plan, but rather generally preserve the free market system. It seems a fair trade for a modest portion of the profits to go back into the system.
At this point I would be reluctant to support taxes on higher ‘Cadillac’ plans, especially if there is a two tiered system where individuals are forced to pay the taxes but union members are not. Either everyone pays or nobody does.
In any case these taxes need to be imposed now, not in 5 or 10 years. If we are going to repair the health care system then we need to do it all at the same time. With our deficits already soaring we cannot have the benefits come in now and the burdens come in 5 or 10 years on the assumption that a future Congress will vote for tax hikes.
This does not mean we cannot gradually phase in the taxes and fees, but the process should start now
A third idea that the left promotes which seems to me to make sense is to lift the anti-trust exemption currently afforded the health insurance industry. This would allow for the government to step in when the various companies conspire to keep rates high or when the collude to block certain benefits or treatments from being offered.
Almost everyone else has to comply with anti trust laws and I see no reason the insurance industry should not do the same.
A fourth area where I think we should adopt ideas from the left is in the area of regulation of costs. The recent example of Anthem Blue Cross trying to raise rates significantly demonstrates one of the major flaws of the current system. We need to have some way for an at least quasi neutral third party to regulate costs.
So I support the idea of some sort of federal regulator or board that insurance companies have to go to to get authorization for rate increases. They would have to justify why the price increases are needed before they can go into effect.
I also think a similar system could be useful in terms of regulating what hospitals and medical providers charge for services. We already have Medicare regulation of what they will pay for services so I think a similar system could be applied system wide.
Now such a system would have to be more reasonable that the current Medicare one, which often pays far less for services that the actual cost. We’d need to have a board with representatives from all parts of the system, including those from the medical industry.
So from the left side of the debate we get four good ideas: Mandatory coverage, Subsidies, Lifting Anti Trust Exemption and Price and Cost Regulation.
But the right also has some good ideas to contribute.
For example there is the idea of tort reform. I know this is something that many on the left oppose but the fact is that if you are going to regulate health care costs you need to reform the tort process. I do not mean by this that we should allow truly negligent doctors or nurses to get away with major mistakes but at the same time I think we need some realism brought back into the process.
Indeed in countries like Canada tort reform has been part of the way they work to keep down costs. You don’t eliminate lawsuits but you do place more emphasis on actual losses and place reasonable limits on punitive damages. In both Canada and Europe there are many examples of the ‘loser pays’ system under which a person who files a lawsuit and loses is required to cover the costs of the person they sued.
Obviously such a system would require fine tuning. We can’t have a disabled person being required to pay thousands of dollars in costs to a rich doctor. But we certainly could have regulations in place to discourage people from filing lawsuits frivolously.
Another good idea that has actually come from both sides, but tends to be a little more active on the conservative side, is the concept of non profit cooperatives. Individuals and small businesses could come together in groups to purchase medical coverage together. This allows them to spread risk and reduce costs.
As part of such a system we should allow for people to shop across state lines. This is one area that brings real fireworks for some on the left but with all due respect I think the argument against shopping across state lines fails to recognize some realities.
The basic view of those who oppose shopping across state lines is that all of the healthy people would go to the ‘cheap state’ which would leave the other state(s) with lots of unhealthy people. This presumes that there are not already such disparities. If you look at say the states of Connecticut and Mississippi you will see my point. They are roughly equal in population but the demographics are very different.
Connecticut tends to have a more affluent population and on the whole a younger one (people tend to retire to the South, not to New England). The affluence and youth means they are both healthier on the whole and also more able to afford coverage. Mississippi by contrast has a poorer and less healthy population and under the current system they are all stuck together, unable to get the same deals that people in Connecticut can.
If we have the price and cost regulation discussed above, that would seem to offer protections against dumping the less healthy population into one bad state. Indeed with regulations requiring plans contain the same basic kinds of coverage it is likely things would balance out nationwide.
A third proposal from the right that I think is valuable is to offer continued and expanded support to the concept of Health Savings Accounts. People need to have basic insurance coverage, that should be mandatory, but they also should have the option to decide if they want a more elaborate plan or if they want to use an HSA to provide resources to pay for the occasional unusual expense.
So this gives us three good ideas from the right to add to the four good ideas from the left for a total of seven concepts from the partisans. Along with the seven concepts that everyone seems to share we’ve got a nice package of proposals that I think both sides should be able to support.
It won’t make the public option/single payer advocates happy nor will it thrill the total free market types, but for the broad majority of us I think this is a very equitable balance. It obviously is not the final solution or a perfect one and even if implemented completely it would probably require adjustment in the future.
But it’s a pretty good start on the process. As with the need to start the income portion of these reforms now we also need to start the reforms themselves. They can certainly be phased in over time but the process needs to begin this year, so we can see how they work and make what changes we need.
I’m sure everyone has some thoughts, and I am sure many of them find flaws in my proposals. I welcome comments on any and all sides because this is an important discussion. All I ask is that we try to keep the debate reasonably civil and that we all try to recognize that just because we do not agree on all the solutions does not mean any of us likes the problem or wants to see people suffer.
Let the games begin.
28 Responses to “A Moderate’s View Of Health Care Reform”
If you're going to impose all those requirements on private insurance, you might as well go straight to GovCare and bypass the stage where everyone's without coverage because their insurers went bankrupt.
We already have Medicaid. Why not just modify its eligibility requirements to include preexisting conditions and let the uninsured apply for that? Then you can leave the rest of us alone, in charge of our own decisions, unlike those 24-year-old “children” you're so worried about.
You are presumably aware that the single biggest budget problem the US government faces over the next couple of decades is Medicare spending, right? That's what happens when you offer coverage to the entire country in order to take care of the unfortunate minority.
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You are going to raise insurance premiums on the middle class, raise their taxes to subsidize the parasite class, and then lower the pay of all of the middle class who work in healthcare by “bending the cost curve.”
Why does the left hate the middle class so much? If you want to limit the income of health care workers, then why not rein in the cost of public sector workers and lawyers. How about no lawyer can earn more than the highest paid civil service worker and that all physicians will be paid more than the highest paid civil servant. That would set priorities and dictate how the government funds health care.
All I can say is you only think you are a moderate.
It's “moderate” by this site's standards, which is left of Brookings.
Plenty of us would have accepted reforms limited to true reforms, which means regulations of the health insurers, ending the worst abuses and problems people are experiencing now.
And that's _federal_ regulation, which in no way has ever been required or even should necessarily be thought of, given that this system is state-based, with state insurance regulations and commissioners. We who have been moderate about this have been exceptionally generous in acceding to the liberal rush to federalize everything that exists. We're willing to see the introduction of federal insurance reform.
Nothing else was justified at this time, and was made particularly wrong to attempt by the Dems' history this past year of seeking massive federal overreach and lunging far too left of the mainstream. We've not seen any requisite, overdue moderation by the Democrats in the federal government this past year.
Well said. Thinking outside the box. I am sorry to see that the vocal majority are those who oppose anything they can't seem to comprehend. (I have mine so screw everyone else) Your ideas are well founded and intelligent.
Interesting comments so far… I've certainly ticked off the right but the left has yet to be heard from.
So for my critics..
First off I support several conservative proposals.
Tort reform is a major bug for the left, especially the trial lawyer lobby but I am in support of it. Same with Health Savings Accounts. The left tends to oppose those but I support them strongly. Finally I advocate both cooperatives for small businesses and shopping across state lines. We've yet to hear from folks like Kathy, Green or FT but I'm pretty sure they'll be unhappy there.
Even those 'liberal' views I support are partly based in conservative ideas. My support for mandatory coverage and subsidies are based not in my view that we should give freebies to people but rather reflect the reality that if a person does not have coverage we are not going to tell them to go in a corner and die.
Rather they are going to fall back on some form of public system, either public facilities or they will make use of the bankruptcy laws to clear debts owed to hospitals. So we are paying for the treatment either way. That I think is the fallacy for many on the right, the idea that we aren't already paying.
By getting everyone coverage then we get preventative care earlier and lower costs.
Similarly, while it has mostly been the left pushing for lifting the anti trust exemption, I would think many conservatives would not like the idea that one segment of the business community gets to avoid the anti trust laws while others don't.
Requiring employers to provide coverage is a liberal view but I balance it with tax breaks to businesses who do provide coverage which is more conservatively oriented.
Price regulation is certainly on the liberal side but again we've got examples of areas where conservatives support them. We subsidize and regulate the agriculture industry both to keep farmers in operation (and I think we all agree having people growing our food is good) and to keep costs within reach of most people.
Certainly the one clearly liberal view is placing more of the tax burden on wealthier taxpayers but as I said, while I am not in any way a fan of taxes the fact is when you place a modest (0.25 to 0.5%) increase on wealthier taxpayers it is more likely to come out of discretionary spending areas than it is with lower income payers.
As to the tax or fee on businesses, I'm talking about a tax on profits only. So if they make $ 1,000 in profit maybe they kick back $ 10 to the system. This system in turn provides the ability of people to buy insurance form that same insurance company or to go to the same hospital and get treatment, and the last time I checked more business is good.
So I stand by the position that my view is a balance of moderate and conservative views, unless you want to argue that tort reform, shopping across state lines, tax breaks, etc are liberal.
OK, I really didn't want to do this but here goes.
2. Requiring that all insurance plans cover preventative care. You argue this is agreed on. I argue it's “liberal” You are basically saying to people. I don't care if you want to spend your money on this, you are going to because I say so. Take an example. What if I don't want an annual physical and I want to spend that money to put in my kids' college funds. Well now I can't do that because it'd going to be priced into my insurance plan that I MUST buy.
5. Banning lifetime caps on coverage. Again this is liberal idea that says that the individual should not be allowed to buy certain types of insurance even if they think it would be beneficial to them. It is also a massive cost shift from the healthy to the unhealthy since premiums in total will be higher for all now that lifetime caps are banned. Lifetime caps actually make insurance affordable for most people.
7. Helping (I love this word) people live a health lifestyle. Define healthy lifestyle. Who decides and what happens if you don't. This is just more government telling people how to live. Not a common sense middle ground proposal even though you think it is.
As to your list of proposals, they are like my wife and I going to buy a car. I want an SUV and she wants a Beetle. I say, let's compromise, I'll take the SUV and you can decide the interior color, the exterior color and whether we get a DVD player or a navigation system. That should be a totally fair deal. I mean, she got to pick 3 things and I only got to pick 1. The “Republican ideas” you describe are ideas around the edges in the context of a system where you've said that the citizens of this country should pay families of four who have an income of $60,000 money so they can buy high priced insurance policies because the government has deemed the low price ones aren't good enough.
As to your perspective on tax rates. The total tax rate for a family in the top 20 percent of the income distribution is 24 percent. For a family in the bottom 20 percent is it 4 percent. That's a ratio of 6 to 1. How high do you think it should be 8 to 1, 10 to 1, 80 to 1?
Finally, your point on interstate competition. You don't want competition. You want heavily regulated competition. God forbid that some state offers a cheap policy that doesn't cover an annual mammogram or prostate test! I mean cheap policies like that just shouldn't be available. It's not fair.
Sorry to rant on but I'm just making the point that things are not moderate because you say I took ideas from one side and from the other. At some point, you have to decide who controls, the individual or the government. You've decided for the government and I don't care about the cupholders.
steve has one thing right. Things aren't moderate just because one person says they are. And steve attempts to portray anything the far right wing conservatives don't like as extremely liberal. After all, any government regulation is evil. steve will attempt to deny that he believes that but just look at his rant. Cheap policies are generally just attempts to rip people off by saying its great in the advertising and having gung ho sales reps and then having people be shocked when they find out how little they are really getting for their money. All steve apparently knows is “Government evil. Government bad.” and that's all he wants to know.
Grow up Jim. Some cheap policies are good for people and some are bad. The question is who should make that determination for you or for me.
Patrick's moderate proposal and your post suggest that you think the government should make the decision for me. I think I should make it for myself. I don't have to buy a “bad” policy but what's bad for me and what's bad for you may not be the same thing.
Government regulation is not evil. Some regulation is necessary but stopping people from buying products and services that are not inherently dangerous is not good regulation. It's paternalism.
I'm sorry you don't see it that way but not surprised.
And now I'll put my Jim hat on.
Jim thinks that all for profit and nonprofit (since many insurance companies are nonprofit) entities are simply in the business of screwing people over. Of course he'll deny it but just look at his rant. “Cheap policies are generally just attempts to rip people off…” All Jim apparently knows is “Companies evil. Companies bad.” and that's all he wants to know.
“Tort reform”
Patrick, if you're curious for your interest, I have probably said nothing at all on this issue, because I find it a side show and actually find it not to be essential (along with so much the Dems are trying to force on us).
As far as calling anyone who isn't left of Brookings “far right,” and who isn't a campus Obamaniac but just a resentful member of and older time and place, all I can say is that it isn't 1965 any longer (at least, for those of us who know that and live in the present, rather than in the past). Oh, and 1980-onward, including the evil Reagan years and the rise of the Sunbelt, is not any kind of an aberration.
Doesn't sound like DLS wants to pick the cupholders either ; )
Both your original post and your subsequent comment are so chockablock with bad analysis that it's hard to draft a comprehensive critique. I'll just hit a few points.
First and most fundamentally, your proposals are basically series of swipes at the tar baby. Our “crisis” in health care is in large part the result of our having made employer-provided insurance exempt from income taxation. That's why it makes financial sense for people to want gold-plated “insurance” programs that deliver a lot of pre-paid coverage for things like routine dental care, counseling, and the like. You propose to make this worse, as far as I can tell, but mandating that ALL employers provide such coverage. If you gave this any thought, you'd realize that lots of people don't want their employers to provide health insurance for the simple reason that they are secondary wage earners who already have coverage through their spouse's employer. Those people want cash income from their employers, not redundant benefits. But you don't want to let people have this option, for no reason that I can begin to comprehend aside from your self-evident belief that ordinary people are incompetent deciders.
Next, you slough off the critical issue of price controls in health care with an utterly ridiculous appeal to our preposterous system of agricultural price supports. If you think that government regulation is somehow necessary for us to have a steady supply of food, then I'm afraid that I have to tell you that you're badly in need of some remedial education in basic economics. In 1900, 41 percent of the US labor force worked in agriculture; by 2000, that proportion had fallen to less than two percent. Yet not only are we not nearing starvation, we are facing an obesity crisis, partly because food is cheaper now in real terms than it was in the past. Government price supports mostly keep the price of farmland high.
The example of the food industry should offer a source of instruction to you. If, in 1900, it had been decided that every American had a “right to food,” and if the food industry had been subjected to the kind of federal regulation that is only just beginning in health care, we would almost certainly not be nearly as productive as we are in agriculture, and taxpayers would find the high cost of food a source of federal budgetary hemorrhaging.
Gee I wonder what some of you really think of my ideas….
Don't hold back…
Amen.
People of good intent can always agree to disagree.
And to be fair I did probably misspeak/mistype in some of my response.
I do not advocate an absolute mandate for employers to provide coverage to their employees but I do support tax incentives to encourage them to do so. I think that this is a good trade off between the lost revenues and the increased aid to the employees. I regret the error in typing on that one.
Regarding the requirement for preventative care coverage, I'm not sure how this is such a big deal. Many plans already offer some basic preventative care plan such as an annual physical. My own policy is pretty basic and it provides such a benefit. It's a good idea because it is cheaper to find the problem now rather than let it worsen.
On the tax rates, I was speaking of a proposed 0.25 to 0.5 percent hike in the medicare tax only. So that is where the lower figures come from, not from income tax rates. No proposal to increase income taxes in my posting. If that was not clear, I want to make it so now.
As to the regulation, I have no issue with flexibility on the level of regulation, for example I think it would be quite reasonable to say that the insurance companies could increase rates up to a certain level (something along the lines of cost of living or inflation plus a bit) but that to make 30 or 40 or 50 percent hikes would require some justification to a third party.
Regarding the basic premise that 'people should be able to choose', again I am all for letting people make their own choices, but are those who have oppose my post saying that if they choose not to buy insurance and then get sick and can't afford treatment that they should just go in a corner and die ?
I assume the answer is no, because we are a compassionate society. That is where the car analogy fails. You can choose to buy a car or not buy a car or to buy a certain model or not and you can survive just fine. But if you have a heart attack and have no insurance, that is a problem you can't live with, so the system would have to bear the costs.
Helping live healthy lifestyle is not mandating certain patterns but programs many employers offer for weight lose, quitting smoking, eating healthier, etc. Voluntary programs.
As to competition, I don't see how we need to have a totally unregulated system for it to be free. There can be a reasonable balance between total regulation and none, and I simply advocate that. A system that would allow competition while at the same time preventing a scenario where all of the healthy people go to one system and leave all of the unhealthy ones stuck with a super expensive plan.
Is this sharing the burden, yes, but I thought that was what a compassionate society was all about, rather than 'survival of the fittest'.
On the mandatory coverage line, another example might be auto insurance. Many states require you to have some basic coverage. Not because they care if you can fix your own car but because it would not be fair for you to drive around with no coverage, hit another car and leave the owner stuck with the bill.
I actually think there is a lot more agreement than disagreement here, but perhaps I am simply wrong about that.
But I appreciate the feedback and the generally civil and respectful tone.
You say I need to grow up. I say you need to grow a brain capable of reading your own rants. You agreed with some of his points? Really? I notice you didn't bother to write one word about that. So why should anyone reading what you wrote think that you didn't oppose every one of his points? After all, every word you wrote was a criticism with not one note of recognition of any valid points. Not one qualifier. I can't remember one word you've written that would seem to back up your claims that you support some regulation. I can't ignore what isn't there.
Wait a second…. Jim is defending *me* ???
and perhaps even agreeing with part of something I wrote ?
What was that pink thing I saw flying past the window…. <G>
You're not capable of thinking like I do, steve. It would require a much better ability to understand the written word than you apparently possess among other things. You see, my sentence held a part of English called an adverb. It had the word “generally” in it. A modifier. It means that the following term is not absolute. It does not always apply. But such nuance is generally beyond ideologues, providing yet more proof of where you really come from and why your ability to recognize moderation is suspect.
My actual belief is simply that for profit corporations that are publicly held and under the pressure provided by Wall Street are incompatible with delivering health care at anything resembling reasonable cost. In addition I think we need a lot of people brighter than either of us working on a way to break out of the current “insurance” model entirely because it's just beyond repair and only provides another layer of money being skimmed off of the system for little real benefit.
It's simple, Patrick. You are right of center. Truly right of center, not so far right of center that you couldn't see it with a good pair of binoculars. steve, in my opinion, goes way too far to remain rational on some subjects. The market system has failures. There are simply places where it falls apart for any number of reasons. I believe that modern health care is one of those places and that there is no way to really make it function fully for us as a society. I also believe that we do exist as a society and that in a time when I can talk to friends and business associates across the world at a moment's notice among other things that change the economic environment beyond all recognition of those who first began thinking of it in the 18th century that we must re-think beliefs that some would treat like laws of nature. I don't see a lot of that in modern American conservatism.
Ah Jim, sanctimony, the last refuge of the clueless…generally that is.
Your post follow below….
“steve has one thing right. Things aren't moderate just because one person says they are. And steve attempts to portray anything the far right wing conservatives don't like as extremely liberal. After all, any government regulation is evil. steve will attempt to deny that he believes that but just look at his rant. Cheap policies are generally just attempts to rip people off by saying its great in the advertising and having gung ho sales reps and then having people be shocked when they find out how little they are really getting for their money. All steve apparently knows is “Government evil. Government bad.” and that's all he wants to know.”
I do note you used the word generally once in a blanket statement. I addressed specific points in a long post and you assumed things I didn't say and perspectives I don't have.
It must be nice to be so wise that you know what people are thinking without them ever articulating the point of view.
So even though I say that some regulation is necessary, you know that I don't mean it. There's that ESP thing again…
Come now guys, let's play nice…..
I must say I find it bemusing that in the same post I'm being labeled center right and borderline socialist.
And I've been called ultra right on other threads.
Boy, I get around……..
Patrick,
Let me be clear. I don't know whether you're a right winger, a socialist or anything else. Nor, to be candid, do I particularly care. You are a thoughtful guy from what I can tell and you put some thoughts down on paper (virtually). I was trying to point out that many of the things you perceive as centrist, I perceive differently and I was trying to explain why.
To Jim's point (when he wasn't insulting my intelligence or my character), I was overly harsh in my tone and I apologize for that. I think I was probably more worried about the characterization of centrism than anything else.
What I am trying to say is I think your measurement of a centrist proposal, like those of many who argue for the current incarnation of HCR, has to do with the number of proposals taken from each side.
The analogy I provided about buying a car was intended to explain that numerical equivalence is not a good proxy for the degree of compromise. If you are concerned about the degree of Federal government intrusion in our lives, you'll find that conceding on a lot more Federal intrusion doesn't feel like compromise, even if you include things like tort reform and purchasing coops.
I'm going to conclude my involvement in this thread by thanking you for posting it, repeating my apology to you for my tone, and wishing everyone a good night.
We may passionately disagree but I find the arguments of most of the people on this site well thought out most of the time. It's why, perhaps to the dismay of some, I keep coming back. I may disagree but I try very hard not to attack the individual. I firmly believe there's a big difference between saying “that's stupid” and saying “you're stupid”. I will respond if personally attacked (often personally) but I try to hold my mud for the return salvo.
Well Steve I appreciate the classy comments and mea culpas.
Certainly I am no stranger to foot in mouth disease, so from my end no worries.
And I just find it bemusing that depending on who I am debating with that I seem to shift along the spectrum
DEAR COMMENTERS a coment has been removed, and I'm asking you to return to the rules of TMV. READ THEM; they are there for civil debate and discussion. NO attacking other commenters or TMV writers. You may get hot under the collar if someone attacks you personally, but I strongly suggest you leave it be, and lead with your facts and ideas instead. I will see such attacks and edit them (which the writer ought to be self-editing to begin with,) or remove them entirely, and'or warn the commenter, or if commenter insists on persisting, they are welcomed to go to the other literally millions of sites online that care nothing about civil discourse.
Thanks
dr.e
deputy managing editor TMV
I simply stated that nothing in your initial rant against Patrick's post indicated that you agreed that regulation is necessary at times. Nothing you have ever posted that I can remember except for this denial has indicated a willingness to admit that the government has a legitimate role in regulating business. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but that's what the overwhelming majority of your writings have indicated.