Comments on: Bzzz. That’s just wrong, on Health Care Reform

By: MonsieurGonzo

MonsieurGonzo — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:58:59 +0000

@super390 very interesting comment; see also recent PBS interview of Yale historian Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers : "There are longish periods where you have three or four contenders, and you go back to not a bipolar world, not a unipolar world, but a multipolar world. I can see in possibly 25 years' time, you have got -- you have got a U.S., you have got a Brazil, interestingly, coming up fast, you have got a China, you have got an India, and a possibly consolidated E.U., and you're looking at something like Metternich's Congress of Vienna [1815] system, a concert of big powers."

ref : “America's unique inability to recognize the failure of private medical markets...” That "public health care" is seen as a market mechanism (e.g., with consumers = demanders and providers = suppliers) is a view most peculiar to the West, in general ~ and democratic capitalist America, in particular. That the relationship between patients and physicians carries with it some implicit notion of insurance = actuarial table-driven MALADY:REMEDY standardization, nowadays so accepted as to be an implicit part of the rhetorical frame or ‘reform’ ~ is, itself a very modern notion. ("the cost/benefit of well being," is, when we ponder it, a rather weird expression :)

By: super390

super390 — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:16:01 +0000

The government either exists to manage an empire abroad, or a decent society at home. It can't do both, and the day will come when it must abandon one for the other.

What are the characteristics of a declining empire?

According to former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips' book "American Theocracy", they include growing militarism, growing religiosity, and an economy that abandons useful production for the debt-based FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate). These combine to shield the empire from reality until disaster strikes.

America's unique inability to recognize the failure of private medical markets reflects several of these pathologies. The FIRE sector certainly is willing to bleed America dry in chronic health care when the banks and housing bubble are exhausted. The teabaggers' blind loyalty to capitalist health care is an attempt to preserve the myth of the self-reliant white farmer/entrepreneur who needs no government but his covenant with Jehovah over the Promised Land.

But every government must have its essential rationale (which we've never provided our puppet regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan). It isn't just the teabaggers and corporate criminals who are stuck with a 19th century conception of government as a tribal army writ large, that leads the barons to conquest and showers loyal subjects with pork barrel. It took truly horrible catastrophes to make western Europeans in the last century cut loose from that madness, and every one ended up with a modern social welfare state. Obama is unready or unwilling to let go of superpowerdom, and so are most of us who voted for him. This kind of paradigm change usually involves civil war and the overthrow of a government. Britain was able to crawl comfortably away from its empire after its catastrophe because it obtained US protection, but there will be no one to do us the same favor.

So how do we talk the American people into seeing the $700 billion going to war annually as the most grotesque form of big government, the part that must be amputated to obtain the resources to "Provide for the General Welfare"?

By: MonsieurGonzo

MonsieurGonzo — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:59:56 +0000

"ramming" refers to either the "reconciliation process" to deprive the minority party of filibuster, or to the "mandate" basis inherent of the 2010 Health Care Reform bill : Democrats in Congress are attempting to make ‘health care’ neither a right nor a privilege, but an obligation for individual citizens, by enfranchising a government-mandated profit center for private corporations. For the first time in American history, politicians are using the coercive power of the federal government to force every American -- simply by virtue of being an American citizen -- to purchase the products of a private company. In effect, this dangerous precedent represents an historic defeat for the type of American idealism represented by the New Deal and the Great Society, and marks the ascendancy of a new type of 'corporatism'.

By: gmoke

gmoke — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:45:32 +0000

Unfortunately, many of the items you write the Bush/Cheny misadministration "pushed down our throats" were supported by real majorities of our fellow citizens. Especially the torture and the war.

We forget that at our own peril.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:02:35 +0000

.
regarding that map proportioned to population,
you are overlooking how the electoral college thing skews.
The actual vote differential was much smaller than the EC differential.
And guess what ? As people learned, or were swayed, or were lied to, or whatever, they've changed their minds, many of them in the middle.
.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:47:12 +0000

Much as I love your blog, making this issue (or really any of the other key issues facing Americans) about parties is wrong headed. The wars were bipartisan. The bailout enjoys bipartisan support. Torture, wiretapping and the generalized evisceration of the constitution and America's values all enjoy bipartisan support. If the parties ever mattered, they don't any more.

Time to go beyond party politics and address the underlying issue – good old fashioned corruption.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:12:55 +0000

What kind of moral values do our congressmen and senators have? Are they a diffrent kind of species than the rest of us? What is it with that seat that is so important to keep and extend? It seems we should only vote for the bilionaires that their elections cant be bought by our heartless corporates. And that their interests in the seat is not based on finantial and self gratification, but rather on the well being of children and seniors. Yeh, right.
What is it with these corporates in the states that can't find a better way to fatten up than on behalf of the health of Americans?
I can't believe that health care is going to turn into a bill that the democrat would just be happy to "pass" regardless of what's in it. That's dangerous. You have the majority. Stop the filabuster on issues like the health of children. Do it. Just do it. I can't believe how someone without any common sense like Bahner is even representing Americans. Yes suck it up GOP. We shouldnt wrestle with a pig doesn't apply anymore. This pig is destroying our faith in the humanity of this courtry. I say president Obama, wresetle it with hands and teeth. Enough, we are sick and tiered and frustrated. And this is the sentiment of most Americans and they know it.

By: Michael Markman

Michael Markman — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:58:01 +0000

There's another important fallacy in the GOP talking point about healthcare polling. The totals of people unhappy with the current bills are made up of people who think they go too far and those who don't think they go far enough. If some people are unhappy because the House Bill has a weak public option and the odious Stupak abortion language—the GOP doesn't get to claim those people as supporters of killing healthcare. Likewise if people are unhappy with the tax provisions and missing public option in the Senate bill, they are not supporting the GOP position on healthcare.