Healthcare Summit

[Bond]

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

[TheGame]

Originally Posted by Bond

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/hea...mit-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...558_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.