Shutdown Supporters, Now That It's All Over But The Crying....

No, the disease is the cost of health care in this country, in part participated by the insurers lobbying state governments to form local monopolies, party participated by Reagan's actions, and part participated by the rapid technological changes in the industry and the companies trying to make as much profit as possible.

You can argue that the ACA is a horrible cure (and it most likely won't be the actual cure to the problem) but to argue it, itself is a disease is foolish.

You *should* be arguing that "Government Entitlement" is a disease; it would work better for you than arguing one symptom of your problem is the whole disease. Just a pointer for you.

Exactly.

I have to wonder if those who think healthcare was so great and effecient before Obamacare understood that then like now THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT SPENT MORE MONEY PER PERSON ON HEALTHCARE THAN ANY OTHER INDUSTRIALIZED NATION.

Seriously. Step back and think about that for a second. Think about all the 'socialized medicine' countries out there. Then think about the fact that their government spends LESS than ours did on healthcare. PLUS we have the added benefit of the government only covering HALF the costs, the other half covered by business and private citizens.

THEN consider that for all that, we still have WORSE health outcomes.

Yeah. Obamacare is the problem.

it's a simple explanation, which is that you apparently don't understand relative vs, raw numbers.

So you're blaming Dems for warning against deficit inducing tax cuts during a time of war? ... And then changing strategies when we found out we were in a recession?

I don't think I've contradicted myself here.

It may be a simple explanation, but that certainly isn't it. Here's a simple explanation: our government keeps spending like a drunk sorority chick on her first visit to Vegas.

That makes a nice talking point but the problem is it isn't true. Government spending is actually well below the post WW2 average as a percentage of GDP and the only reason we even have a deficit right now is that tax rates are way, way below the post WW2 average. Post WW2 average is ~24.5% of GDP spending, ~23.5% taxes but right now we're at ~20.5% of GDP spending and ~17% of GDP taxes. No, it is not even remotely fiscally conservative to keep cutting taxes without off setting spending cuts. We've cut a heck of a lot of spending in the last half decade but we've kept taxes near record lows thus the deficit.

Is this true? The majority of Democrats were opposed to the extraordinary measures that Bush put in place to try and slow the free fall?

That's not how I remember it. And considering they were in control of the House I find that unlikely.

It's also not the impression I got from Barney Frank's introduction to Hank Paulson's (Bush's Secretary of the Treasury) book On the Brink nor is it what I got from the book itself.

I recall Congress voting for a budget busting bank bailout when Bush was still President. And that's just one example of how Frontline's claims are revisionist. I, for one, have never been anti-deficit, so when I argue in 2013 that deficits are fine and even good, that's consistent with a decades long position, and not a matter of who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Sidebar but if you really want to know what the fuck happened you need to read On the Brink and Bailout Nation. On the Brink has a perspective that only someone who was in the fucking middle of it all can give, but you also have to read it understanding that it's a HUGE CYA. Combined with the 30,000ft perspective of Bailout Nation and you've got the clearest picture of just what the fuck went so wrong.

Last time I recommended a book (From the Shadows) Bock had nothing but praise.

That was consistently the complaint from the Republican leadership. John Boehner has basically alienated every single person on Capitol Hill, and I'm very sure there are machinations in the works to ensure he's either dropped as Speaker, or defeated in the next election.

Let me be clear: there is no "Republican Party". There's a very loose coalition that controls the House of Representatives, but it's completely unmanageable. The Democrats should be recruiting as many people as they can to repopulate the Blue Dog Coalition.

I'm not sure how possible that is, at least in the Deep South. Down there Democrat, like Canadian (this is mostly service industry), has become code word for Black.

They really should but some I don't see them doing it. Here in San Diego the leading candidate for mayor (we're having a special election next month because our previous mayor had to resign following tons of sexual harassment claims) is a former moderate Republican who is now a Democrat so maybe the trend will go national.

It's amazing how you manage to say that like it's a bad thing. Like it's bad that because we live in such a "PC climate" she wouldn't have been charged with terrorism for doing the same thing but saying "Allah" instead of "God."

An article worth reading.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/17/shutdown-lessonsfromabroad.html

Yeah, conservatives never do that.

Charged with terrorism? No. Questioned for quite some time by the NSA? Probably. Treated poorly by the media, the public and most of the congressmen who witnessed the event? You bet.

Here's an interesting article on the debt ceiling.

I don't pretend to understand all of it, but I thought this part was interesting.

Wow. I hope the Republican leadership is doing more self reflection after this fiasco than their water carriers here on WF.

Precisely the point that he fails to see.

So then the term 'debt ceiling' is a misnomer. It isn't a ceiling, there's no point having it, and the votes on whether or not to raise it are a sham, since "yes" is assumed to just be a given, and "no" is the end of all life on earth. That's what I was asking.

The debt ceiling is an artificial thing created for the purpose of politics. Congress authorizes, indeed demands borrowing, when it passes a deficit budget. The ceiling is a pointless restriction as it conflicts with the already approved borrowing. So yes, there is no point in having it. But not only that, it's dangerous because it opens the possibility for default when the country's finances are perfectly sound.

I seem to recall a while back reading that medical expenditure per capita is 2-3 times higher than in other civilized countries, yet we have lower life expectancies than some of those same countries spending much less than us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_(PPP)_per_capita
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

Japan for example, spends less than half the amount we do per capita, yet has an average life expectancy 4 years higher than ours.

Yeah, I don't rightly understand why the debt ceiling continues to exist, at the time that the debt ceiling act came into being, the President had a lot more leeway in how to allocate spending. But the
Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 changed all that.

That is the key part. We really are spending 2-3 times as much and not getting as good of results and we're still not even covering 1/4th of the population. We just have an extremely fragmented and inefficient system with way to many useless middlemen who are all taking a cut but who don't seem to add much in terms of care for end users. We KNOW how we can half costs yet actually cover everyone but it seems ~1/3rd of the people don't want them mostly because they're scared of change and don't want to see anything new.

Actually, it's because overregulation is what put all those middlemen into the mix in the first place, which shat up the whole thing to begin with, and now the ACA is putting even more middlemen into the equation while similarly promising -- and already failing to deliver -- a better result. The system got shit up by government interference, now more government interference is further shitting it up, and there's the root of resistance.

If regulation is the problem then why does every single other advanced economy have more regulation yet all of them spend far less per person than we do even while covering more people and having better outcomes? The German or Dutch national health insurance systems are what I would be attempting to replicate in America.

John Castle's definition of "shitting up" includes, among other things, the fact that 3.1 million young, healthy people are now paying affordable premiums into the system which, for those of us who understand scary things like numbers, comes under the heading of "spreading the risk."

That must be what our resident Mad Hatter believes, because otherwise he's talking about the purported "failure" of something that doesn't even start until January 2014.

Or is he equating the sign-up with the thing itself? In that case, he should never visit IMDb again.

I see. So is it your contention that people aren't getting letters in the mail informing them that they're being kicked off their health insurance plans and being left to choose Obamacare plans that have them paying higher premiums and higher deductibles? Is that not happening within your bubble?