Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Politics / Woods Robin Smith Launches New Kook Movement
Posted by Jeff Woods on Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 7:27 AM
Comments (20)
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Can you imagine this clown in Washington? She would become another embarrassing congressional representative for this state. I guess she wouldn't be too much worse than Wamp, however.
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I didnt watch the vid and dont know this woman but when Chicken Dick Cheney says that the constitution is just another God D@#$% piece of paper, I think we might need to be a little bit concerned. just a little
"It's a harmless way for the tin foil hatters to flip off the guvmint"
You mean tin foil hatters like Charlie and Martin Sheen, Michael Moore and Rosie Odonnel when they said or suggested 911 was an inside job?
patriot act
military commissions act
repeal of posse comitatus act
using the interstate commerce clause to give the fed government jurisdiction over everything in the entire legal universe.
if you think our constitution protects your rights, try and use it as a defense in court. try and tell a police officer at a roadblock that he has no right to search your vehicle without probable cause. tell that to detainees who are held indefinately without a trial as a result of the patriot act.
wake up. america is not a magic country. absolute power corrupts absolutely, and if you do not preserve your rights, they will go away.
do you even support the US Constitution? The 10th amendment is not being enforced. do you like that fact? do you think the constitution and its respect for natural rights is "antiquated"... doyou feel that woodrow wilson's "administrative model" of progressivism(aka feudalism) is a better system? if so, there are plenty of brutal dictators the world over that share that view.
how about FDR. should we pack the supreme court when it disagrees with the executive? she would bring back internment camps for japanese and german americans?
we are in dark times, the executive branch has been looting and pillaging the natural rights of the citizen, and chipping away at the checks and balances that used to restrict it. now we have several unconstitutional "wars"(aka our military being used as a corporate enforcer) we imprison more people for victimless crimes than CHINA.
"IT would be nice if wingnuts could sell something besides FEAR."
On the contrary,it is the leftists that consistenly sell FEAR in their attempts to relentlessly expand government power.
As in health care is in a CRISIS! - we need socialized medicine now!
As in "global warming" is going to wipe us all out! - we need a massive government takeover of the energy sector (and by extension every other sector of the economy)!
As in the economy is in a CRISIS! - we need the "stimulus" (i.e. a massive giveaway of the taxpayers money to traditional Democrat party constituency groups) to "save" the economy!
Rinse and repeat endlessly.
Reasonable people can disagree about proposed solutions. But, Gilbert, if you think the present healthcare system is sustainable — that is, NOT in crisis — you seriously need to pull your head out of your ass and look around.
Whether something is sustainable over time (which I never claimed to be the case anyway) is not the same thing as being in an crisis. A crisis is something immediate.
The "crisis" is a only political one for Democrats trying to capitalize on the economic recession as a rationalization to force the country to lurch further to the left.
Their own bill doesn't even go into effect until several years out, so even they don't think it's a REAL crisis.
Our country is in crises these days.it's toast. Everything is in a complete mess. Thats not selling fear. That is reality. First we have monkey boy Bush turning everthing over the banking international crime syndicate. Then puppet Uncle Tomma Obama, along with the rest Federal leadership, finished it off.
The healthcare system is both unsustainable AND in crisis.
How big of a damn idiot are you trying to be?
"The healthcare system is both unsustainable AND in crisis. "
Yeah?
Show me some absolute, definitive proof of that - idiot.
You can't explain or prove anything you overinflated gas bag.
You have absolutely nothing to go on other than promoting the liberal "entitlement" mentality.
It is the existing government created entitlement programs themselves that are the problem and are unsustainable. Creating a massive new one doesn't "solve" anything and just digs the hole deeper.
Keep repeating your mantras, Gilbot, and they will sound true to you.
You're deluded in believing that Medicaid and Medicare "themselves...are the problem." It is quite true that skyrocketing costs make them unsustainable over time. It is also quite true that skyrocketing costs affect the private healthcare system in exactly the same way and make it similarly unsustainable
I have said on this board several times before that healthcare reform will fail unless something is done to bring costs a little more in line with what other developed nations spend on healthcare. To cite just one of many examples, Japan spends about 8% of GDP on healthcare, has fewer doctors per capita than we do, yet has better health outcomes. In the US, we spend 17% of GDP on healthcare (within a decade it will be 20% if nothing changes) and have far worse health outcomes than most developed countries.
But all the discussion (and many false claims) about the yet-to-be-worked-out details of the various healthcare bills floating around Congress should not blind people to the realities about the current system. We have a healthcare system that, overall, is heavily oriented toward private enterprise and for-profit medicine. This system is woefully inefficient, as evidenced by our poor outcomes and by the 100,000 patient deaths each year attributed to preventable medical error (something for which neither private nor public payers have created any meaningful financial disincentives, though Medicare is actually making strides in that direction). We have a private system that is heavily bogged down by bureaucrats — the insurance companies that must provide preauthorization of treatments, concurrent and post-treatment reviews, and often take decisions about care out of the hands of doctors.
Most of all, we have a system that heavily rations care. Sometimes, it rations according to what insurance companies deem as medical necessity or projected efficacy of the treatment (just as critics charge, more wrongly than rightly, that some of the reform plans will do). Even more, it rations according to ability to pay or your health status. If you can't afford decent coverage and don't have employer-sponsored benefits, you're rationed out. If you have a pre-existing condition and lose your job and have to find individual coverage, you're rationed out. And most cruelly, if you develop an illness that is expensive to treat, there's a decent chance that your insurance company will review your records, find some fraudulent "pretext" for claiming that your condition was pre-existing, and either refuse to pay for your treatment or drop your coverage altogether. In fact, this is happening to a number of people who develop even not-so-serious illnesses. In short, insurance companies are keeping costs down in some cases by fraud.
One thing that the relatively modest plans put forth so far would do is eliminate these most unfair types of rationing. But of course it's hard to get anywhere in a discussion when you're talking with people who refuse even to recognize that we have rationing now.
No, Biggs I simply don't accept any of the premises that your position is based on.
Healthcare is not a right and we do not all have some "collective" responsibility to make sure that everyone gets it.
The federal government has never had any legitimate Constitutional authority enact any of the entitlement programs it has already created - or any new one either. It is not pursuant to any enumerated power delegated to the federal government in the text of the Constitution as is required by the 10th Amendment.
Your premise about what constitutes rationing is equally bogus. Unless government force is involved - it isn't rationing.
If I can afford to buy a house and you can't that doesn't mean a house was "rationed" to me and not you.
If I can afford to buy a new car and you can't that doesn't mean a car was "rationed" to me and not you.
If I can afford to go to Morton's for a steak dinner and you can't that doesn't mean a steak dinner was "rationed" to me and not you.
There is nothing "special" about healthcare that makes it diffenent from houses, cars or any other commodities.
And as for your comments about rising costs in Medicare vs private insurance - one of the principal causes of rising costs in private insurance is cost shifting from Medicare and Medicaid to private insurance.
Those programs are even MORE unsustainable than they nominally appear precisely because of that.
Like I said, Gilbot, I can explain it for you but can't understand it for you.
Your argument that healthcare is no different from cars, houses or other commodities speaks volumes. In a whole slew of ways (some of them inherent), healthcare does not operate like the free market.
For example, the current private system offers so little transparency that consumers lack the information to make rational decisions about their care. Insurers negotiate deep discounts with providers, but these rates do not have to be disclosed. Consumers see only the amount they pay as co-payments, so they have no idea what their care really costs. Medical savings accounts are hailed as a panacea to this problem, putting the consumer back in charge of spending decisions. They do help, to some extent; but in practice what often happens is that people simply make the decision to save money by forgoing care that could help ameliorate chronic and more expensive problems down the road. Meanwhile, the system of negotiating discounts between providers and insurance payers means that consumers who pay out of their own pocket are gouged with the wildly exorbitant full price. There is no possibility that they can enjoy the discount available to the insurance companies. It's hard to think of another industry that works in a way that is this distorted. Sure, if I'm a volume purchaser, I can negotiate a discount from some provider of goods or services, but the gap between the full price and the discount price is nothing even close to what you see in healthcare. And in other industries, consumers have other discount options. For example, if I have to travel on less than a week's notice, I'll get gouged by the big national airlines, who offer deep discounts for booking early. But I have the option of making my arrangements earlier or, in many cases, of flying on a discount airline to the same destination or one that's close enough for me to rent a car. There's no U.S. equivalent of Southwest or Jet Blue when it comes to heart surgery.
But on a more fundamental level, healthcare is by nature different from other consumer decisions. When I'm buying a new car, I can compare a world of information about different makes, models and even individual vehicles. The information is understandable enough to most laypeople that I can feel confident I'm making an informed decision even if I'm not a mechanic. And, as with airline tickets, I can choose a number of different options along the price-value continuum, from a Corolla to a Cadillac, depending on my needs and budget. There is no such continuum when it comes to many healthcare decisions, such as treating a brain tumor or renal failure. Moreover, even if I am able to access information that would help me make more informed decisions about healthcare (such as outcomes data from various providers, or the number of procedures performed by Surgeon A that I can compare with the number performed by Surgeon B, or the general efficacy of one drug over another), it's still not like comparing the mileage and reliability ratings between a Toyota and a Subaru. Unless I have the kind of training my doctor has (or have close access to someone else with such training), I can't make a fully informed decision about my care. I have to trust my doctor, or find another doctor to trust instead. In our system, doctors function both as salespeople and as advisers in a way that, say, care salesmen do not. I don't tell my doctor what I want in treating a particular condition and expect him or her to follow my orders, like I would tell a car salesmen that I want to order by Toyota in blue, with manual transmission and the enhanced audio package. The doctor-patient bond and the dual role of doctors in our system inherently distort normal market forces.
Bottom line: If you think healthcare works just like any other good or service, then you're too ignorant or dogmatic to participate in a meaningful give-and-take on the subject.
The bottom line is that I don't accept your premise that healthcare is a right.
Everything you have posted is based on the premise that it is one and that the governmnet has the legitimate authority require us all to participate in and pay for a system that guarantees it.
Remove those premises and everything you've said about it is irrelevant - so your position is every bit as "dogmatic" as mine.
No one has any more right to require anyone else to subsidize their consumption of it than they do any other commodity regardless of all your blather about the mechanics of it.
Before the government enacted wage controls on employers during WW2 and triggered the practice of employers offering healthcare as an unregulated fringe benefit to compete for employees, most people in the country did not have health insurace.
They weren't all running around squealing about it being a "crisis" back then.
If the absence of health insurance wasn't a "crisis" then, it's not a crisis now.
Robin Smith stated in this YouTube video (approximately 38 seconds into the video) that the "jujitsu-ary" (at is the third branch of the U.S. federal governor...and I suppose that Smith has also purchased her own 65 Tennessee state flags to give away on election day in 2010.
