Sunday, 10 April 2011

Open thread for night owls: What digby said (again)

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At the Campaign for America's Future, digby writes Making Tough Decisions:

Sometimes I think that the best thing that the only way our country is going to survive is if all of our political elites are forced to live like an average American for the next two years. And by average, I don't mean the delusional upper middle class, highly educated, well-connected professional kind of average. I mean the world of the sandwich shop owner, the garage mechanic, the office supply salesman and the corporate clerical pink collar ghetto office assistant. People who make between 30 and 60k a year and don't have a lot of expectations that they will make much more. The middle class workers who don't get to go on TV or have anyone but their closest families and friends ever tell them how great they are and encourage them to believe they will accomplish great things. The people who are just living their normal lives in their normal communities, doing normal, everyday, unremarkable things. In other words, most people:

If they did they would find that :

Seniors would enter the health care world the rest of us live in, with co-payments, deductibles and managed care. Eventually, cost control would require some tough decisions about end-of-life care and the rationing of high-tech treatments that have limited efficacy. But starting with a value of $15,000 per year, per senior?the amount government now spends on Medicare?Ryan's vouchers should provide excellent coverage. His change would amount to a minor amendment to the social contract, not a fundamental revision of it.
That's written by an alleged liberal, by the way, not some tea partying moron.

Most old people would be lost in "the health care world the rest of us live in" because if you are self-employed or unemployed, as retirees are, you'd have to "shop" for insurance, go through huge hoops to get insured, manage a complicated health care bureaucracy that you don't understand, even when you are sick.(Anyone heard of elder scams? Yeah, I thought so. And just because they are illegal doesn't mean they don't exist.) Doing all that is difficult even for people who aren't aged, infirm and often very ill with debilitating diseases. Acting as though throwing those people into the pool is going to somehow be beneficial to the individual, much less the system as a whole, is nonsensical in the extreme.

But you wouldn't know that if you get health insurance from your employer as most Americans do. ...

Cost of medical care is a problem across the board for all ages. Solving it by telling the sick elderly that they are just going to have to suck it up "and join the world the rest of us live in" isn't going to solve it. There are ways to control costs without putting the burden on sick people. If that's the best solution "liberals" can come up with in a rich country in which the top 1% of its citizens owns nearly half the country's wealth, then I'm afraid our little experiment in enlightenment has been a failure and it's back to the drawing board. ...

? ? ? ? ?

At Daily Kos on this date in 2007:

For those of you keeping score at home, the ninth and tenth state legislatures to enter into the impeachment sweepstakes are: Wisconsin (thanks to State Rep. Frank Boyle of Superior) and Hawaii (thanks to State Senator Les Ihara, Jr. of Kapahulu).

Wisconsin and Hawaii join eight predecessors: California, Illinois, Vermont, Minnesota, New Mexico, Washington, Missouri, and Texas.    

That makes 10 states and 80 state legislators cosponsoring the call to impeach since bills began being introduced last year.

Word is that New Jersey and Maine are on the cusp. One more state after that would put it at 1/4 of the states in the country.

But as you know, Joe Klein says that while the president is "clearly unfit to lead," actually doing something about it is "counterproductive and slightly nutso."


Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/hWw1N1ROSYs/-Open-thread-for-night-owls:-What-digby-said-(again)

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