Rick, “careful and thoughtful” just don’t apply to our Congress. They should, but unfortunately, they don’t–on either side of the aisle. At least not in any meaningful amount.

This is my view, we are overreaching and if we did this in small steps to bring things under control it would end up with something that people can see and accept, big dumb changes are something that everyone fears and gripes about afterwards. Just like ’shovel ready’ projects that never came to pass, at least in my area, I don’t think that this Administration and Congress can focus on some targeted reforms that would help and at least make a change that can be built on.

No.

You’re a little late Rick — the “let’s just stall and healthcare reform will lose its momentum” was getting old two months ago.

Just to satisfy my curiosity, how much “think” will make you comfortable with the outcome? How long has this been going through the “thinking” phase? How much longer will it be before anything is ready to make into law (if at all)?

Sounds like “Stop. Think. Go Back.” translates to “Stop. Think. Go Back And Do It The Way I Want.”

And if Republicans gain even one Senate seat, health care reform is dead until a Republican is in the White House - and they will of course go on to fuck it up (TAX BREAKS FIX EVERYTHING YAYYY!). The R Party isn’t filibustering this because of principle - they’re filibustering to prevent the President from any law people might like passing while he’s in office.

This is the only shot. There won’t be another. (Realistically, if a Republican Party did anything to deal with spending, they would scrap Medicaid).

I thought this was a pretty interesting post. I’ve noticed that you’re quickest to comment in here when someone takes an assholish tone. I’ve done that. (Not that you’re a resevoir of gentility either - not that you’re obligated to be, nor am I) Anyway, the preamble here is an alternative to try to draw you to answer, instead of anger.

That’s not really why I’m doing it - this post also just doesn’t anger me. I get angry at intellectual dishonesty and blithe dismissal of serious problems - which is most of what conservatives offer on health care. Tax breaks or HSA’s don’t do jack diddly for low-income (but above Medicaid) folks. We pay little federal income tax anyway (although we pay plenty of state and local taxes & payroll taxes). There’s nowhere near enough income taxes left to do a dime’s worth of difference on health care costs that will instantly bankrupt us.

You’ve admitted the problem, which is a good start. I thought you were as ignorant on this issue as most conservatives when I commented on this last time - you demonstrated that I was wrong.

So you know some things, but you make inexplicably weak arguments.

How can you base how messy a bill this is on its length? It’s a complete straw man. The Senate doesn’t write legislation in this manner because making your bill 1000 pages long is fun. They do it because if you don’t dot every I and cross every T, the law will be nullified by smart lawyers in 300-page court decisions. Or, in the exact opposite of your suggestion, it will be forced by not being 1000 pages to fail to explain how it should be reconciled with previous 1000-page bills. THAT!! is the moment when the law’s intent can be most easily manipulated by bureaucrats.

However, thank you for, again, breaking with dishonesty and bullshit by not avoiding the truth that Reagan’s tax bill was 1000 pages long. It may have been a bad bill (I don’t even know if you’re reffering to the 1981 one or the 1986 reform, which most people think was pretty good), but its length had nothing to do with the massively deficit-introducing consequences. Nor did, for the most part, the favor-trading. The deficit exploded because he cut federal revenue by massive amounts while growing government spending faster than Jimmy Carter. Everything else is trivia.

So that argument makes no sense.

Furthermore, a bill like the one you support would ALSO have to go through this “highly confusing” process wherein Nancy Pelosi picks the bill she wants, Max Baucus rewrites the bill that makes you happy, and then they have to negotiate something in between while handing out the favors to compensate for their compromises.

If you don’t like it - I’m not thrilled with it myself. My suggestion would be to abolish the Senate and move to a unicameral legislature. Otherwise, every bill will be subject to the exact same twists.

By the way, there’s no way the Baucus bill is “dead in the water” unless “dead in the water” means “going to pass with at least half its provisions intact” or even “going to pass almost exactly as written, with some extra revenue chunks and perhaps a mediocre public option.

So, in conclusion - reasonable background view, but I don’t get the argument. You know, if you settled for being a conservative Democrat, you wouldn’t have to come up with complicated reasons to be angry at things you basically support.

You know as well as I do that most of the things you want out of healthcare reform are both in the Baucus bill and will be in the final version.

The only place you really disagree with a liberal like myself is the public option.
Your argument there is also very poor. I actually don’t like government for the sake of government, but there is absolutely no other way to provide any relevant competition in the market whatsoever.

Every state in the country is dominated by a near-monopoly or an oligopolistic cartel in the insurance market. For Pete’s sake, there’s an antitrust exemption, how else could it be?? Furthermore, the nature of risk pooling and the infinite advantage to scale in net liquid assets means that insurance should naturally be an, um, extremely uncompetitive market.

Futhermore, it’s also incredibly inelastic. When your health is seriously threatened, you must take the services. There’s no way to make demand fall, so prices can’t decline.

If you don’t get the insanely rapid rise in private health care costs to fall, you will never, ever, ever get Medicare costs under control. If Medicare payments get too far behind the private sector, the distribution network will collapse. Your choices are a) scrap Medicare or b) kill the constant rise in private health care and health insurance costs (200% in the last 10 years, I believe).

This bill is your only chance at that. The excise tax is a good start. A public option is a better one. The first one is a direct financial penalty to high costs. The second bands the un- and self-employed into an effectively organized interest group in a way that they will, never, ever, ever be able to do on their own.

How in the heck can you talk about the need to get Medicare costs under control, and not side with a bill cutting $400 billion out of Medicare?

Overall I think we’re in trouble no matter what happens with healthcare. Given the current moral climate and large bill is going to be full of massive pork and excess which could make things much worse. I wish they would stop, think, go back.

“The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage.” - Alexis De Tocqueville

That’s why I’m a Democrat: I prefer corrupt, well-intentioned simpletons to batshit race-baiting nuts.

I’m pretty sure that’s what the Founders were going for.

It’s a swell combination: a party of corrupt, gutless simpletons on one side and a party of nihilist loons on the other.

The party of gutless simpletons gave the country Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid so I am betting that between the two the Democrats are more likely to deliver a system that is intended to work.

At least the Democrats start from the premise that government can work and try to reach a good outcome.

The GOP believes government cannot be run efficiently or well, and they set out over the previous eight years to prove it.

In a perfect world — no, not even perfect, just rational — we’d be looking seriously at larger changes, not smaller ones. As Dave Schuler convincingly and persistently argues, we need fundamental changes in the incentive systems built into health care, and we need to increase the supply of health care providers in order to drive down costs.

We need a lot of big changes. But we can’t do things that way because the Democrats are half in the bag for the health insurers and doctors and hospitals and the Republicans have decided that their sole contribution to democracy will be repeated expressions of contempt for Mr. Obama.

It’s a swell combination: a party of corrupt, gutless simpletons on one side and a party of nihilist loons on the other.