The National Debt Road Trip

[Sargeras]

Now this shit is scary, but an interesting way of looking at it.

How do the Obama deficits compare with past presidents? And how did the national debt get so big anyway. This video tries to answer those questions by looking at the debt as a road trip and seeing how fast different administrations have been traveling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5yxFtTwDcc

[Aslanna]

Can there really be "Obama deficits" before his first full year has even been completed?

[Sargeras]

Can there really be "Obama deficits" before his first full year has even been completed?

He says that it's the President's own budget projection over the next eight years.

[Winnow]

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/peter-roff/ ... -look.html

Having come into office with an ambitious agenda to remake America, Barack Obama is discovering that time is not his friend. According to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll, Obama's approval rating has dropped by nine points, down to 55 percent from where it was when he first entered the White House six months ago.

On its own, a nine-point drop over that period of time does not seem like a cause for much concern, especially when a majority of the country continues to approve of the job he is doing. But there are plenty of warning signs within the data, on its own and measured against other presidencies.

A 55 percent approval rating at this point in time puts him in 10th place over all among presidents who have served since Gallup began tracking presidential approval and disapproval in the 1940s. He is less popular than both Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush were at the same period—and they both lost their bids for a second term.

The decline in Obama's approval numbers is being driven by a lack of confidence in the way he is handling four key domestic issues: the economy, taxes, the aforementioned healthcare, and the federal budget deficit. And, says Gallup, "The biggest drop has been on his handling of the economy, down 12 points since February; his disapproval is up 19 points."

[Fenna]

There is a very real possibility that both Cap and Trade and Health Care Reform will fail to pass, thus avoiding (or at least delaying) the end of manufacturing in the US and the free market. I don't believe they will fail, but I have Hope that they will.

[Xyun]

I don't have any health insurance now. I support any plan to get me affordable health insurance. I don't understand why people like you would want to deny me HEALTH insurance. To be honest, I really don't give a shit. Only an ignorant dipshit would make the assertion that public health care would end the free market. How fucking stupid can you possibly be?

[Tyek]

Xyun I am sorry you don't have insurance, but are you asking me to pay for your insurance or for an affordable plan?

With my knee arthritis and surgery history, and my son's growth hormone requirements, we could never get insurance on our own. We need a work plan that does not allow them to turn us down. I want to see insurance available to everyone that is affordable, but I don't want to get taxed anymore to pay for others. My 4th quarter bonus last year lost HALF of the money to taxes, how much more does the government need? I could have reinvested that money into the economy far more efficiently then the current tax spending is doing.

[Zaelath]

Public health care doesn't pay for knee surgery, or arthritis (other than pain management), so it's kind of irrelevant to the discussion...

Basic healthcare is well within your ability as a society to provide, and is a lot more efficient at getting your workers back to work than healthcare that relies on having a job.

But I can see how you would have trouble with the concept in a society that worries about funding football at school before healthcare.

[Neroon]

Factoring in costs borne by the government, the private sector, and individuals, the United States spends over $1.9 trillion annually on healthcare expenses, more than any other industrialized country. Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medical School estimate the United States spends 44 percent more per capita than Switzerland, the country with the second highest expenditures, and 134 percent more than the median for member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

http://www.cfr.org/publication/13325/

Was just reading this article. I'm all for national health care, but not at the prices these greedys pricks in the current system are charging. I think the free market is clearly failing the consumer in this instance.

A friend of mine had a few stents put in a year or so ago. They basically feed a catheter up through your main artery in your leg and put little springy things in to open up the arteries going to your heart. His procedure....$70k. How do you justify that?

It's the same machine they used for my $2500 cardiac catheterization. I know the procedures are a little different but, wtf? Same machine, same amount of doctors and nurses, how do you go from $2500 to $70k?

[Fairweather Pure]

I don't need to go see a Dr with 8 years of college education to tell me I have bronchitis. The whole system is out of whack from the top to the bottom. We need to rebuild the entire system.

I support pretty much anything that helps the the people of this country. Let's have a discussion and impliment healthcare for our country instead of going off to another war for once.

[Funkmasterr]

I am not saying that our health care system is good, I don't think anyone really claims that.

However, I cannot see a single reason why I should pay a cent for any of you fuckers health care. I already have serious issues with welfare and all the other ways tax money gets peddled out to people who can't/won't fend for themselves. You are not my responsibility, and spare me the comments about that being part of society cause that's bull_shit.

There are plenty of other completely valid reasons to be weary of a national health care plan. The government could pass laws/regulations to favor their plan and make things harder on the insurance companies which would make things for those of us not sucking on the government teat more expensive. You also have issues of how difficult it is to have things that insurance companies consider "elective" done under socialized health care in other nations, which doesn't sound like a big deal unless you've ever had experience seeing just how absurd some of the things they consider elective are.

I just don't get it, hard times come around and everyone has their hand out and wants to find everything they can to get something for nothing. Talk about not contributing to society, get a fucking job (or two, or three if you have to) and fend for yourself, no one else is responsible for you.

[Xatrei]

You do realize that a national healthcare system has been an agenda item off and on for the last 97 years dating back to Republican hero Theodore Roosevelt, right? This isn't some new response to hard times, although the recession certainly helps to highlight the many inadequacies of our current "system." I also reject the notion that contributing to a national system that provides universal coverage is somehow "paying for everyone else's health care needs" as being overly simplistic. It's not radically different from what happens now when you pay into any for-profit insurance company's plan. The key difference is that the government doesn't take a big slice off the top for their profits. Providing universal health care benefits every citizen in the same way that providing education, roads, bridges, airports, police and fire services, military defense and any other civil service does. Beyond simply being the morally right thing to do, it makes the country more productive. We have the worst system in the industrialized west - is that something we should accept?

The root cause of our problem is that health care has become a very lucrative, for-profit venture that is beholden to the investor class, and not a non-profit endeavor for the benefit of society. Because of our inherently corrupt and irretrievably broken system, I have no hope that we'll ever get away from the profit motivation in the health care industry. I think ideally, the solution would be to nationalize the healthcare industry (hospitals, physicians, clinics, etc.) funded through a single payer, federally managed system that everyone pays into. The poor and those otherwise unable (as opposed to unwilling) to work would be subsidized by the federal government. This, however, is not a practical solution given the big-money interests that are hard at work manipulating their puppets in the congress. The best we can really hope for is a strong public option for those without access to traditional health insurance coupled with a national insurance mandate, and strong insurance reform such as getting rid of pre-existing conditions and corporate bureaucrats standing between patients and their physicians. It's better than what we have now, but ultimately it's nothing more than a bandaid, and it will eventually fail due to the profit motive still being too heavy of an influence.

[Spang]

New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit

How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn't do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn't used to define us. But now it's becoming all that we are.

Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for corporations. There are more private contractors in Iraq than American troops, and we pay them generous salaries to do jobs the troops used to do for themselves ­-- like laundry. War is not supposed to turn a profit, but our wars have become boondoggles for weapons manufacturers and connected civilian contractors.

Prisons used to be a non-profit business, too. And for good reason --­ who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition you're going to have trouble with the tenants. But now prisons are big business. A company called the Corrections Corporation of America is on the New York Stock Exchange, which is convenient since that's where all the real crime is happening anyway. The CCA and similar corporations actually lobby Congress for stiffer sentencing laws so they can lock more people up and make more money. That's why America has the world's largest prison population ­-- because actually rehabilitating people would have a negative impact on the bottom line.

Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died last week, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it."

But maybe they aren't. Because unlike in Cronkite's day, today's news has to make a profit like all the other divisions in a media conglomerate. That's why it wasn't surprising to see the CBS Evening News broadcast live from the Staples Center for two nights this month, just in case Michael Jackson came back to life and sold Iran nuclear weapons. In Uncle Walter's time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies.

And finally, there's health care. It wasn't that long ago that when a kid broke his leg playing stickball, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun put a thermometer in his mouth, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle and you were done. The bill was $1.50, plus you got to keep the thermometer.

But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some Wall Street wizard decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're run by some bean counters in a corporate plaza in Charlotte. In the U.S. today, three giant for-profit conglomerates own close to 600 hospitals and other health care facilities. They're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. America's largest hospital chain, HCA, was founded by the family of Bill Frist, who perfectly represents the Republican attitude toward health care: it's not a right, it's a racket. The more people who get sick and need medicine, the higher their profit margins. Which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O.

Because medicine is now for-profit we have things like "recision," where insurance companies hire people to figure out ways to deny you coverage when you get sick, even though you've been paying into your plan for years.

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private health care "soulless vampires making money off human pain." The problem with President Obama's health care plan isn't socialism, it's capitalism.

And if medicine is for profit, and war, and the news, and the penal system, my question is: what's wrong with firemen? Why don't they charge? They must be commies. Oh my God! That explains the red trucks!

The Source

[Aabidano]

Was just reading this article. I'm all for national health care, but not at the prices these greedys pricks in the current system are charging. I think the free market is clearly failing the consumer in this instance.

The core of the problem with the current system is that it's controlled by the for-profit insurance industry. The lawsuit crazy populace is a lesser issue.


Remove insurance from the equation entirely. I don't grudge anyone a profit, in this situation they're just a blight, like a tick sucking the blood out of a healthcare system they do not contribute to in any meaningful fashion, except to maintain their profits.

Hospitals and doctors offices, left to themselves could become a working free market with regulation.

When widespread health insurance\company sponsored healthcare became the norm in the 60s and 70s they were a benefit. That hasn't been the case in a long time. Look at the cash the insurance lobby spends each year, it's staggering. Look at the portion of your premium that actually gets spent on healthcare, it's sickening.

*Edit - I think the Swiss have laws against health insurance companies being for-profit.

Buying health insurance for day to day needs is like taking out an insurance policy to cover your grocery bill. Like has been mentioned before, the basics should be available to all at minimal cost. Coverage for "catastrophic" events should should be free, completely.