Friday, August 21, 2009

SCOTT Horton writing in Harper's is too kind: In a word, they are murderers. But then, so is anyone who lies about the reasons for an invasion of a sovereign country that leaves more than 4,000 Americans and thousands of others dead.

Addendum ...

AH, common sense from a commentator at the NYT's The Opinionator blog today:

1. August 19, 2009
1:47 pm

MEDICARE FROM BIRTH TO DEATH
There is no need to establish a new government authority to handle health insurance,
nor should any new agency be developed. MEDICARE is already the National Health Insurance and should be issued at birth with SS#’s. To pay for this:

All 10 million+ government employees have their taxpayer funded health benefits transferred to MEDICARE, which becomes the National Health Insurance Carrier. An average payment of $12,000. - $30,000. is now being paid per year per person to insure government employees at all levels with taxpayer money going to private carriers.

This should be illegal. We already have a National Health Plan. Why are we allowing all that money to be paid to private health insurance companies? We are talking about $20,000,000,000 ( 20 Billion) would be injected immediately into our MEDICARE system, paying for all uninsured citizens to be on MEDICARE as well. The only administrative thing that needs to be done is to change the current age restriction backward to birth. That can be effected with a stroke of a legislative pen. Existing commercial insurance companies can continue to insure all the major corporations. Employees who receive health benefits in the private sector may use either their MEDICARE or the plan purchased by their employer.

— Richard E. Schiff

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

THE Republicans will also lie about the health care co-op model, writes Timothy Egan, and Orrin Hatch, of all people, should know better.

Addendum ...

BOB Herbert explains what "reform" its critics call Obamacare really amounts to.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

WE'VE all heard, by now, those horror stories about how awful "socialized" medicine is in Canada, France or wherever. In the interest of being fair and balanced, the conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan offers a collection of horror stories involving the U.S. system. Read a roundup of Views From Your Sickbed — read 'em and weep.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

BRUCE Bartlett, the respected conservative economist, understands reality: the economic collapse was indeed a product of the Bush years. A quotation:

... the extremely poor economic performance of the Bush years really set the stage for the current recession. This is apparent when we compare Bush’s two terms to Bill Clinton’s eight years. Since both took office close to a business cycle trough and left office close to a cyclical peak, this is a reasonable comparison.

Throughout the Bush years, many conservative economists, including CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, extravagantly extolled Bush’s economic policies. As late as December 21, 2007, after the recession already began, he wrote in National Review: “the Goldilocks economy is outperforming all expectations.” In a column on May 2, 2008, almost six months into the recession, Kudlow praised Bush for having prevented a recession.

But the truth was always that the economy performed very, very badly under Bush, and the best efforts of his cheerleaders cannot change that fact because the data don’t lie.

BUT, nevermind, as Paul Krugman properly notes, even so-called centrist Republicans can fall prey to not just the usual liars like Limbaugh, Gingrich and Palin but other right wing purveyors of nonsense such as the Washington Times and the American Spectator.