You Know Things Aren't Going Well...

You know things aren't going well for the Democrats when people like Washington Post journalistic super genius and all-round liberal weenie Steven Pearlstein have to come up with drivel like this:

Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, this week revealed a secret Republican plan that would end up eliminating all federal farm subsidies; closing down Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks; selling off the interstate highway system; and canceling Head Start, subsidized school lunches and the entire college loan program.

Steven, here' a news flash: If a secret Republican plan has been deliberately released to the public by Republicans, it isn't a secret plan. It's a press release. There is a difference, and the difference is important.

Moron.

Undeterred, Pearlstein continues:

Steele's stunning announcement brings the conservative strategy of "starving the beast" to a new level. Under the guise of protecting the elderly, Republicans hope to realize their dream of eliminating half a dozen Cabinet agencies, firing tens of thousands of government workers and ending government regulation as we know it.

The announcement was "stunning"? Really? Well, stunning to Pearlstein at least.

It is an interesting measure of the intellectual vacuity of today's so-called "professional" journalism that a Washington Post editor would allow something like this to be published in anything other than a Dave Barry column:

According to Steele, Republicans will also seek to outlaw "any effort to ration health care based on age." You don't have to be a lawyer like Steele to understand that would effectively make it a federal crime for any hospital to refuse a heart transplant to a 95-year-old, or for any doctor to refuse to prescribe Viagra to a sexually precocious seventh-grader. Although Steele did not indicate what the penalty would be, he did not rule out the death penalty.

Then again, it also serves as an interesting measure of the intellectual vacuity of today's left/liberal supporting arguments for Obamacare... Whatever that might actually be. 

And these assholes can't figure out why people aren't buying newspapers.

Comments

[DonnieDarko]

I never thought anyone could make me long for the competency of the Carter administration.

[markg8]

He is responding to Steele's bizarro world op-ed that the WaPo published the day before. Here's a few tidbits:

While Republicans believe that reforms are necessary, President Obama's plan for a government-run health-care system is the wrong prescription.
...
Republicans want reform that should, first, do no harm, especially to our seniors. That is why Republicans support a Seniors' Health Care Bill of Rights, which we are introducing today, to ensure that our greatest generation will receive access to quality health care.

First, we need to protect Medicare and not cut it in the name of "health-insurance reform." As the president frequently, and correctly, points out, Medicare will go deep into the red in less than a decade. But he and congressional Democrats are planning to raid, not aid, Medicare by cutting $500 billion from the program to fund his health-care experiment.

Second, we need to prohibit government from getting between seniors and their doctors.

Third, we need to outlaw any effort to ration health care based on age.

Fourth, we need to prevent government from dictating the terms of end-of-life care.
Seniors know that government programs that seem benign at first can become anything but.

So basically Steele, who when unable to answer reporters' questions about health care last month said "I'm not a policy guy", wants to keep Medicare on an ever rising trajectory of unsustainable costs. Spending too much for too little just like the rest of our health care system.

It's amazing considering it's that same Republican party that passed the Medicare Part D drug plan with massive taxpayer giveaways to the drug and insurance industries, with no way to pay for it, no corresponding cuts in spending or increase in taxes that turbocharged Medicare's financial problems.

Perlstein is right. We'd either have to increase FICA taxes to say 20% or slash all other domestic spending.

You conservatives are schizophrenic. You railed against Medicare for decades as socialized medicine, fucked up it's finances and now you want to keep it on the road to ruin.

Is it any wonder the American people don't want you controlling the levers of power anymore?

[Progressive White Liberal]

People aren't buying newspapers anymore because they can't handle the truth, man! OUR truth!

And you just know that if we have 7-year olds running around with boners, Glenn Greenwald will move back here!

[Dennis the Peasant]

I'm well aware of what Steele wrote.

I'm just marvelling that Pearlstein could come up with something just as stupid.

And Mark, Barack Obama is now in charge of the massive giveaways.

Just ask PhRMA and Tom Daschle.

[Dennis the Peasant]

And wheren't you arguing a couple of weeks ago that Medicare was so much more efficient than private insurance in terms of administrative costs?

Talking points change?

[markg8]

Medicare uses 3 to 4% of it's revenues in administering it's business: paying health care bills. Private insurance uses 31% of it's revenues to do the same job and pay billions in executive salaries, shareholder profits, lobby congress, advertise to us, and pay for a huge bureaucracy designed to deny and delay payment of medical bills.

Medicare spends too much because hospitals and doctors game the system. Medicare only pays 80% of the going rate? Jack up the price, order more useless tests, drugs and procedures, or cost shift elsewhere. You're just as likely to harmed medically in this country by over treatment as under treatment. My mother would tell you if she had survived the triple bypass she was in no condition to undergo.

[Mike]

Wow Dennis you are a dummy. Pearlstein wrote a sarcastic piece. Funny, other bloggers got it. You guys don't do irony do you?

[richard mcenroe]

Reptiles don't seem to understand that the GOP is NOT the force driving the groundswell of outrage against the Democratic Party. They are not giving the marching orders, they are trying to play catch-up.

And Michael Steele and the rest of the clueless DC GOP are the reason they can't. They're still stumbling around mumbling "come on, the tar pit can't be this deep all the way across..."

Conservatives are finding new voices on their own, funding new candidates on their own, and revitalizing their movement (and, collaterally the GOP) without the "help" of the RNC. Hard for the MoveOn/OFA/PFAW/OA set to imagine, but it's happening.

[richard mcenroe]

And reptile, your story, if true? I'm sorry for your loss. But if you're seriously suggesting your doctors insisted on your mother having a triple bypass she was in no condition to survive (um, wouldn't they have noticed?)then you and your family would have retired wealthy people by now off the lawsuit.

Unless... and I blush to suggest it... you're not being completely factual with us here...

[markg8]

Reptiles don't seem to understand that the GOP is NOT the force driving the groundswell of outrage against the Democratic Party. They are not giving the marching orders,

Absolutely right. It's the insurance companies thru astroturf outfits like Freedomworks and Campaign for Patient's Rights led by disgraced former hospital CEO Rick Scott who hired the same PR outfit behind the Swift Boat Vets who are organizing the outrage with the teabaggers.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/04/conservatives-for-patient_0_n_251193.html

Conservatives are finding new voices on their own, funding new candidates on their own, and revitalizing their movement (and, collaterally the GOP) without the "help" of the RNC.

Like who? Joe the Plumber? You got any actual political candidates? And what banner are they going to run under if not the Republican party's? Or are you planning on just shooting your way to power?

[markg8]

I'm well aware of what Steele wrote. I'm just marvelling that Pearlstein could come up with something just as stupid.

You may be aware of Steele's idiocy Dennis but your readers aren't. You are in effect defending Steele's dimwitted proposal and Pearlstein's right, that's what it would accomplish.

And Mark, Barack Obama is now in charge of the massive giveaways.

Hence health care reform to fix them. Have you written your congressman demanding government negotiated drug prices yet?

[Wendy Laubach]

Republicans want to lay of thousands of federal workers? Make it hundreds of thousands, then let me know where I can send my check in support.

[markg8]

Make it hundreds of thousands, then let me know where I can send my check in support.

Send your check to the DNC.

Led by Vice President Gore's National Performance Review, the Administration promised to create a Government that "works better and costs less." And we have made a good start. We are saving money, cutting the work force, eliminating needless regulations and improving the ones we need, streamlining bureaucracies, cutting red tape, and finding numerous ways to better serve Government's "customers"--the American people.

Costs Less

The Administration has:

* Saved over $100 billion, largely through a series of management reforms.
* Cut the Federal work force by over 250,000 employees, 1 creating the smallest work force in 30 years and, as a share of total civilian employment, the smallest since 1931. Thirteen of the 14 Cabinet Departments have cut their permanent work forces between 1993 and 1996; the Justice Department is growing because of the Administration's expanded war on crime and drugs.
* Eliminated over 200 programs and projects--major programs like the Bureau of Mines, and smaller special-interest or narrowly-focused activities like wool and mohair subsidies and the Tea-Tasters Board.
* Closed nearly 2,000 obsolete field offices.
* Negotiated better deals for Government purchases. The Government now pays $3.62 for a three-pound commercial overnight delivery, compared to the $27 retail rate, and as little as two-cents-a-minute for long-distance calls, compared to the 16-cents-a-minute retail rate.

*1 As of September 1996

http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/misc/budget.html

[markg8]

Oh yeah Richard that's just what I wanted to do. Sue a bunch of sleazy doctors at the only hospital in town, the local heart surgery mill, where I knew I'd have to send my dad in an emergency because the VA hospital is too far away. Then spend years in court fighting slimeball insurance company lawyers and expert liar witnesses as they run my mother's memory through the mud for what in the end would be little to no chance of winning and even less of getting a settlement on appeal thanks to tort reform laws passed by Republicans in this state.

This is for you:

http://www.coalitionforpatientsrights.org/tort-reform.shtml

"Crushed by My Own Reform"
By Frank Cornelius
New York Times, October 7, 1994

About the Author: Frank Cornelius was a former lobbyist whose clients included the Insurance Institute of Indiana. He passed away in 1995.

In 1975, I helped persuade the Indiana Legislature to pass what was acclaimed as a pioneering reform of the medical malpractice laws: a $500,000 cap on damage awards, and elimination of all damages for pain and suffering. I argued successfully that such limits would reduce health care costs and encourage physicians to stay in Indiana—the same sort of arguments that now underpin the medical industry's call for national malpractice reform.

Today, from my wheelchair, I rue that accomplishment. Here is my story.

On Feb. 22, 1989, I underwent routine arthroscopic surgery after injuring my left knee in a fall. The day I left the hospital, I experienced a great deal of pain and called the surgeon several times. He called back the next day and told my wife to get me a bedpan. He then left on a skiing trip. I sought out another surgeon, who immediately diagnosed my condition as reflex sympathetic dystrophy—a degenerative nervous disorder brought on by trauma or infection, often during surgery.

A few months later, when a physical therapist improperly read the instructions on a medical device, I received a tremendous current of electricity through my left leg. This seriously complicated my condition.

In August 1990, another physician proposed a medical procedure, but used the wrong instrument; that left me with several holes in the vena cava, the main vein from the legs to the heart. I would have bled to death in my room if my wife had not come to see me that evening and called for help. As another physician tried to save my life, he punctured my left lung.

The cost of this cascading series of medical debacles is painful to tally:

I am confined to a wheelchair and need a respirator to keep breathing. I have not been able to work.

I have continuous physical pain in my legs and feet, prompting my doctor to hook me up to an apparatus that drips morphine. My pain used to rate a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. Now it's about a 4.

Twice, I have received last rites from my church.

My marriage is ending, and the emotional fallout on our five children has been difficult to witness, to say the least.

At the age of 49, I am told that I have less than two years to live.

My medical expenses and lost wages, projected to retirement age if I should live that long, come to more than $5 million. Claims against the hospital and physical therapist have been settled for a total of $500,000—the limit on damages for a single incident of malpractice. The Legislature has since raised that cap to $750,000, and I may be able to collect some extra damages if I can sue those responsible for the August 1990 incident that nearly killed me. But apparently because of bureaucratic inertia, the state medical review panel that certifies such claims has yet to act on mine.

The kicker, of course, is that I fought to enact the very law that limits my compensation. All my suffering might have been worthwhile, on some cosmic scale, if the law had accomplished its stated purpose. But it hasn't.

Indiana's health care costs increased 139.4 percent from 1980 to 1990—just about the national average. The state ranked 32d in per capita health care spending in 1990—the same as in 1980.

It's understandable that the damage cap has done nothing to curb health care spending; the two have almost nothing to do with each other. In 1992, the Congressional Budget Office reported that medical malpractice litigation accounted for less than 1 percent of total health care spending. I doubt that the percentage in Indiana is much different.

Proponents of Indiana's damage cap argue that doctors here pay less for malpractice insurance than their colleagues in other states. What they don't say is that malpractice premiums are artificially low because insurers need to offer only $100,000 of coverage. Negligently injured patients who are entitled to more than $100,000 must look to Indiana's state-run excess compensation fund.

Because that fund is supported by a surcharge on doctors, the true cost of malpractice insurance in Indiana can be calculated only by adding premiums and surcharges together. And the surcharge for the compensation fund has ballooned.

Doctors and insurers have spent millions propagating the myth that America is awash in unjustified malpractice suits and crazy jury verdicts. And apparently they have captured the attention of the President and Congress: malpractice damage caps were part of many health care measures in Congress this year, and they are sure to be back when the issue resurfaces in the next session

The prospect that these "reforms" will be enacted is frightening. Make no mistake, damage caps are arbitrary, wholly disregarding the nature of the injury and the pain experienced by the plaintiff. They make it harder to seek and recover compensation for medical injuries; extend unwarranted special protection to the medical industry; and remove the only effective deterrent to negligent medical care, since the medical profession has never done an effective job of disciplining negligent doctors.

Medical negligence cannot be reduced simply by restricting consumers' legal rights. That will happen only when the medical industry begins to effectively police its own. I don't expect to live to see that day.

[JeffS]

You may be aware of Steele's idiocy Dennis but your readers aren't.

How is it that you know about Steele's idiocy, Mark? You're admitting that you don't read anything here? Before posting, I mean.

;-p

BTW......I have not contributed one fucking penny to the RNC of late, in no small part due to Steele's idiocy. I would not be surprised to hear of similar attitudes from the other readers here. Of course, I have a higher opinion of them than you do.

[markg8]

Jeff Dennis didn't cite Steele's idiocy here for the edification of his readers. I read it last night at the WaPo after reading Pearlstein's piece. Like all of his stuff Steele's latest idiocy made for much guffawing on our side of the net.