Healthcare Summit

[Professor S]

Too much to comment on, but I will mention this from what I saw this afternoon:

The rest of the Republicans need to shut the &%$# up and let Paul Ryan do their talking for them. McCain has turned into an infant hung up on one topic, Cantor brought a friggin' prop, and except for Ryan and the female Congresswoman (forget her name) the rest are only spitting out the same talking points we've heard for months.

But Paul Ryan... WOW... he disassembled the bill and reduced Pres. Obama's response into a stuttering reiteration of what VP Biden had just said about Medicare Advantage, a topic which had little to do the points Ryan addressed.

How old is he? I want to vote for that guy.

Anyone else catch any of this summit? Personally, I'd love to see more of these. Besides some people on both sides treating it as a soapbox opportunity, I think that even though there is little agreement on how to address the problems, everyone has been shown to recognize the issue and at least differences on solutions have been clarified.

[TheGame]

I think this event was needed long ago. I can't wait to see the highlights.

[Professor S]

Just wanted to add the video from the Paul Ryan portion I mentioned in the first post.

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I really wish they included Pres. Obama's response in this clip. Also, I haven't heard anyone refute any of Ryan's numbers so far, but I'll admit I've been watching off an on as I work from home so I may have missed it. If anyone has seen a rebuttal for them, please post it. I find the numbers fascinating, but I"m talentless in math myself.

[Bond]

Paul Ryan is slick. He actually represents a lower district in my state (Wisconsin). I have been watching him for quite some time with interest.

[Teuthida]

Refreshing to see someone from the opposition using facts and figures.

[Professor S]

Refreshing to see someone from the opposition using facts and figures.

Agreed. Fiscally conservative arguments work best when broken down to the brass tacks, and not in populist sound bites. Unfortunately, we see far to few politicians in general willing to trust that the American people want or have the capacity to absorb such information.

Universal Healthcare is a very attractive concept, and if you're going to take a stand against a government overhaul to achieve that ideal you had better be very detailed and thorough in your reasoning and opposition. You'll never win the argument otherwise because emotion and the ideal of equality/justice will prevail.

[TheGame]

Hopefully Paul Ryan will get fact checked within the next 24 hours here. If he's not, then this will be an epic failure on the part of the media.

[Bond]

I'm confused, you are automatically assuming he is wrong?

[TheGame]

I'm confused, you are automatically assuming he is wrong?

No, but I'm not going to assume he's right either. I want to know if this is a fact or not. I don't want one of the very few reasonable sounding republicans to be swept under the carpet by the media.

[Professor S]

Factcheck.org on the Healthcare Summit. Ryan's comments appear to be untouched by the red ink of a correction pen (at least so far). I'm curious to see if he is found to be 100% accurate. That would be a rarity for any politician, and an admirable rarity.

http://www.factcheck.org/2010/02/health-care-summit-squabbles/

EDIT: This is the only thing I've found so far that refutes (using the term loosely) any of Ryan's comments:

Ryan overhypes Medicare Advantage hit

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) claimed that under the Democrats’ plan, millions of seniors will lose their Medicare Advantage plans.

Not quite.

According to health policy experts, it’s fair to say that if the Democrats have their way, the benefits provided by Medicare Advantage will be reduced — which means that a number of seniors might choose not to enroll in the program in the future. That doesn’t mean people are going to “lose” their plans, exactly — just that fewer are likely to enroll. Seniors would still be guaranteed their traditional Medicare benefits.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33558_Page2.html


EDIT again: An interesting tidbit from the factcheck article

One last point: Alexander said “taxes” would also cause premium costs to go up – but that’s not really the case, according to CBO. Paradoxically, CBO predicts that the Senate bill’s excise tax on high-cost health plans would actually bring premium costs down. That’s because the tax would induce employers and employees to choose lower-cost plans with less coverage, to avoid being hit by the tax. CBO said the average premium for those affected by the tax would be 9 percent to 12 percent lower.

So yes, premiums would be lower, but with a commensurate lowering in care to avoid a prohibitive tax. So it turns out that Republican claims about "rationing" healthcare aren't all that crazy after all. It's just that taxes are being used to ration instead of an obvious law.

[TheGame]

I don't like the cost controls in the bill, and the adjustable "cap" for how much premiums can be. I think that this may cause people to lower and raise the caps for political reasons, and possibly cause the insurance companies to not make realistic decisions for themselves on how much the pricing will be.

This is why I always supported the public option.. I'd rather the government try to fix the problem themselves opposed to trying to control the private industry directly.

Anyway...

I watched some of the highlights from yesterday's event. It was republicans basically saying "Lets scrap the bill and start over (so that we can say we won a political war)" vs democrats saying "Please give us some new ideas that we haven't already used from your party (So that we can try to bash the ideas or say how they're already included)".

And dems weren't trying to scrap anything, and Republicans weren't trying to give any new ideas.

While I have to give the republicans credit for making Obama look closed minded to an extent, I still am on Obama's side of things. I wish republicans gave more direct examples of things that are in the current bill that needed to be dropped, and made Obama have to defend the ideas more.. opposed to doing stupid talking points about how Obama did back room deals, and broke campaign promises.

Republicans should have played more of the "Got'cha!" game. Like with how the bill is set up to collect funding 4 years before anything goes into effect. Every time they said it, it seemed that it was tacked onto some political Speech that gave Obama way more to respond to. If you give Obama too much, he has a way about avoiding the answers that make him look bad.

But... I only watched the highlights, so they probably did do some of what I said above, and media is just not framing it that way.