Obamacare: 17 Trillion funding gap

I have asked this before. If the free market is a myth, please explain laser vision correction. This is healthcare. It is an extremely sophisticated surgical procedure that restores eyesight. It came to market without any government "assistance". Save the occasional government union do-nothing, it is almost never covered by health insurance -thus- is a transaction where the price is set by the actions of only the buyer and the seller (your mythical free market). The result - it has gotten better, safer AND less expensive. I am aware that the FDA slowed all of this down, so save that - no current market is absolutely free - but the less planned and managed a market is, the more equitably and efficiently it performs. I'd also avoid using the "isolated example" rebuttal because I can do this ALL day.

I didn't disagree with you on price fixing, I'm reminding you of the reality we live in.

You should deal with reality instead of chasing unicorns.

The unicorn I was chasing went to the veterinary clinic to have some of her lady parts removed. The procedure was called a hysterectomy. The DOCTOR used the same gas anesthesia, sterile surgical procedures, instruments, drugs and suture material that would be used on a human. In fact because this unicorn weighed 800 pounds, he used several times more of the consumables than his human DOCTOR equal would have. The craziest thing happened at checkout - she was charged about a tenth of what a human would pay for essentially the same procedure. I asked the DOCTOR about this odd discrepancy. It turns out that he does not take insurance and therefor can only charge what the Market is willing and able to pay. Even though he spent 8 years at Cornell, employed a large support staff, and maintained a beautiful facility, he was somehow still able to operate a profitable enterprise. Shocking.

Even if Sessions team is off by 10 trillion dollars, that's still a significant budget gap and certainly more than the 900 billion we were told, just sayin.

it's also a good reason to never vote for sessions again
that fucker can't add worth shit

When there was a true "free market" in the health care field, we had patent medicine, like irradiated water and uranium suppositories.

Ah the good old days.

Great point. Who declared Seldane, Permax, Vioxx, Bextra, and Baycol safe and effective?

How does your reply address the dramatic price difference of veterinary and human medicine? Are you suggesting they use uranium suppositories at the animal hospital?

If they were concerned about health care, they would take off the mandates of the insurance companies.

Really, 16 TRILLION IN DEBT AND RUNNING 1 TRILLION IN DEFICITS for the foreseeable future is a good thing.
The only reason why we aren't in default is because countries want access to our markets and commodities are priced in dollars.

There is no comparison to be made, are you daft? An unregulated health care industry proved itself to be a danger to society.

But all regulation and government management is baaaad, right uncle buck!

"An unregulated healthcare industry is dangerous". - Current "regulators" declared the 5 drugs I referenced to be safe and effective. All 5 are no longer available because they were determined - by the people who actually took them (those people represent the MARKET) - to be either not safe, not effective and in some cases both. Does that trouble you? If so I have a solution, MORE REGULATORS. We need someone to regulate the regulators that failed the first time. Eventually we will need someone to regulate these guys too incase they fuck up. I think 7-10 layers of regulators each regulating each other and then 10-12 extra layers of super regulators to regulate the the lower levels of regulators. Then we could add a half dozen of so committees to evaluate the success or failure of all of our regulators.

Or...

We could realize that the best regulator is the Market. All participants make independent decisions designed primarily to enrich themselves that result in a better quality of life for everyone else. I am, among other things, a landlord. I purchase multi-family properties (duplex triplex etc), fix them up and raise the rents. Because they already exist as apartments and because the "regulators" in my town are the typical lazy, corrupt and incompetent government do nothings, I rarely pull permits or face inspection. Despite this lack of regulation, I do my best to provide a safe, clean place for my tenants to live. Why? Not because I care about their safety or comfort, rather I want good tenants, high rents, and realize that a fire or similar catastrophe would both destroy my asset as well as (assuming we keep a free press) create a poor reputation for my brand. Do you honestly think Pfizer or Toyota only endeavors to bring safe and reliable products to MARKET because they face regulation? Really? Google "going concern" if you want to understand why you are WRONG.

Your way was tried and it was a miserable failure. just Google patent medicine and learn, that was the era of snake-oil, unregulated remedies, sold by Mr Haney...

You are a loon. the FDA has been gutted by K-Street. The answer is more regulators, better regulators and less influence on the regulators by those they regulate.

This strategy by K-street has been played out across many levels of government, its whe we are in the sad state of corporatism/fascism right now and dupes like you believe this equates to a free market....

The only thing free about is corporations free reign to rig the game and pump-up profits at the the public's expense. More regulation is absolutely called for and urgently needed. This is something I think Obama will take care of in his second term.

Would a ratio of 2 regulators per citizen be acceptable to you?

With no regulators some salesmen sold unsafe and ineffective medications. With regulators some salesmen sell unsafe and ineffective medications. I see your point.

You're out of ammo pal.

If I am out of ammo, it is because your arguments Are (pardon the pun) full of it.

You have continued the discussion without ever addressing a single point I've made. You have - admirably - not called me any names or posted any pictures or maps but you have not answered:

Why do elective medical procedures rise in safety, efficacy and availability and drop in price?
Why do wealthy residents of countries with socialized medicine come to the U.S. For healthcare?
Why does our system produce nearly all medical related innovation?
Why does a hysterectomy on a 100 pound dog cost $800 and $8000 on a similarly sized female human?
Why have our regulators approved unsafe and ineffective "patent medicines"?
Why would more regulators prevent this from occurring?
How many regulators should we have? How many per citizen would be too many?
Who regulates our regulators?

Uncle buck, ya got nothing but standard right-wing-speak that pretends there is a free market. There is no need for a free market, markets without regulation are free-for-alls, where corruption and thievery thrive. The housing market is one such example, brought to ruination by a under-regulated fannie/freddie and the free-for-all wallstreet wiz-kids. They very nearly ended the world as we know it.

I did answer many of your questions, you're too bust regurgitating right-wing tripe to notice

just like everything else? like cars? like houses? You have no point here, what did the right wing radio guy tell you? why is a good or service evolving significant in your argument? The car industry is regulated and it has evolved. the housing industry is regulated and it has evolved. They have evolved partly because they are regulated.

Because we an advanced country and our system allows for those with cash-in-hand to get services ahead of anyone else. Again, I view that as an indictment of our system, not a benefit. Chavez went to Cuba, he is still kicking for now.

Like what? Cancer survival rates, heart disease, kidney and liver disease still kill us in about the rates as they have for a long times. Life expectancy in the US is below that of socialized countries so where is the benefit?

You must be joking?

I already told you, the regulatory process has been adulterated by big-pharma lobbyists.

More and better regulators. We don't need lobbyists writing the laws that regulate any more. You are just not informed uncle buck, what you are is opinionated and there is a big difference, especially if you are firmly wed to your opinion because a man on the radio reinforces your stoopid ideas daily.

This is "free market, right uncle buck, senators getting millions from big pharma for weakening drug laws? Right?
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-05-10-senators-drug-bill_N.htm

We need a transparent and corruption free regulatory process and the FDA needs to repopulate itself with real scientists, not a platoon of rubber-stamping idiots that do what they are told.

HHS regulates them.

When the government requires banks to make loans to people that they otherwise would not, that is not the free market.

When a government supported enterprise buys back these loans, that is not the free market.

In a free market, banks loan to the credit worthy or they fail. in a regulated market, the government decides who loans how much to who, what interest rate they pay and then further convolute the natural order of things by buying these same toxic loans back, reselling them to investors and then-using our money or our "credit card"-bail out these same investors. These are the talking points of the Right, they are also the facts. I have conceded that I agree with conservative pundits on this topic. Please respond to the facts I have presented. Because my review of WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED has also been pointed out by others does not render it wrong on that basis alone.

Cars and houses are dropping in price? The main issue with the healthcare is it's relative affordability. How about a history lesson? FDR froze wages. (This is an example of regulation) the free market got around the wage freeze by including insurance coverage in compensation. The result is a destruction of Market principles in healthcare. If I need to have my appendix removed, I use the insurance that my employer provides (I pay for it indirectly), my insurance company negotiates on my behalf with a doctor (who must factor into his cost the losses he takes because of other regulations) and THEY arrive at how much I will pay. If I want to have surgery to restore my eyesight, I negotiate directly. The result nonelective surgery prices rise, elective surgery prices plummet. If car repairs were paid for by employee benefit insurance and mechanics were required to repair all broken cars with no regard to their owners ability to pay, would they cost more or less than they do now?

What specific factors have caused us to be an "advanced" country? Should people with cash in hand wait behind people with no cash? Without goods and services being delivered to those that can afford them how should we distribute them? Hold a drawing to see if you get to drive a Lexus, a VW, or take the bus?

When you have the ability to diagnose and treat specific diseases, they end up on the cause of death line on your death certificate. When you die in the waiting room suffering from undiagnosed/untreated cirrhosis,
or you die in a mud-hut collapse 5000 miles from the oncologist you DISTORT THE STATISTICS.

I am not joking. Why can I get my puppy vaccinated, my cats leg x-rayed and set, or my dog surgically altered at 1/10th cost of the same service for my self or my child. Veterinarians have identical undergrad requirements as human doctors and spend just as long in grad school. They use the same drugs, techniques,instruments, and buy supplies from the same manufacturers. I am intimately familiar with the industry and would choose an animal hospital for my basic care requirements over the free clinic (given only those choices) every day of the week.

More and better regulators? Laughable.

Really Uncle Buck!!! And when banks red-lined neighborhoods and refused to lend and serve the community they were located in, that was the free market, right uncle buck!!! Yippe kaye mother-fucker!!!

Welcome to reality, glad you finally showed up. I told you before, the free market is a myth.

You just posted some many inaccuracies and lies I have no idea where to begin.

And uncle buck, its been posted here ad nauseum that the CRA is not and was not the catalyst for the housing disaster. That was wall-street, wall-street bundled junk mortgage bonds, got their buddies to label them AAA and sold them all over the world. That is because they too have corrupted the regulatory agencies that oversee them and that also needs to be corrected.

Well we may happen to agree here, I also believe that insurance companies have no business at all in my health-care. It is an unnatural alliance and "insurance companies" amount to a foreign parasite on health-care transactions but what have I been telling you? The "free market" is a myth. Maybe you can start to see it.

You hold health care as one would hold a commodity, I view health care as a human right so we have a fundamental difference in opinion. I am firmly for single payer.

Bullshit uncle buck, bullshit, there are no mud huts in Canada and Canada beats us in life expectancy, infant mortality and cancer survival rates and they are the dreaded single payer system.

Canadians may complain about their health care but none of them are clamoring for our model, no one up there wants anything to do with our model.

You are bizarre.

If you want to get your health-care at a veterinarian clinic, by all means good luck in finding one that will treat you.

Uncle buck, again you are really nothing more than an ignorant and opinionated fellow and you should be ashamed of yourself for thinking you are knowledgeable enough to discuss these issues on a public message board and advance your ignorant opinions, which obviously consists of 100 percent right-wing dogma and tripe.

Its sad to see people in your condition and state of ignorance but it can explain why you would go to a vet for a check-up...

Clinton pushed to have that red lining stopped in the Gramm Leach Billey Act, how did that work out? Oh yeah, less than a decade later 30% of all mortgage were sub-prime= not worth the paper they were written on. The economy has been in the toilet ever since.

How about we narrow it down to it's substance. You view healthcare as a human right. The FACT is that healthcare is a finite commodity, comprised largely of the labor of others. So, in your view, you have a right to another's labor. It that correct?

I'm not an economics expert but in my opinion the GLB did more damage by creating super-banks and repealing Glass-Steagall than it ever did by strengthening the red-lining regulations.

Everything I've read suggest CRA loans had nothing to do with the crisis.

Community Reinvestment Act had nothing to do with subprime crisis

Posted by: Aaron Pressman on September 29, 2008

Fresh off the false and politicized attack on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, today we’re hearing the know-nothings blame the subprime crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act — a 30-year-old law that was actually weakened by the Bush administration just as the worst lending wave began. This is even more ridiculous than blaming Freddie and Fannie.

The Community Reinvestment Act, passed in 1977, requires banks to lend in the low-income neighborhoods where they take deposits. Just the idea that a lending crisis created from 2004 to 2007 was caused by a 1977 law is silly. But it’s even more ridiculous when you consider that most subprime loans were made by firms that aren’t subject to the CRA. University of Michigan law professor Michael Barr testified back in February before the House Committee on Financial Services that 50% of subprime loans were made by mortgage service companies not subject comprehensive federal supervision and another 30% were made by affiliates of banks or thrifts which are not subject to routine supervision or examinations. As former Fed Governor Ned Gramlich said in an August, 2007, speech shortly before he passed away: “In the subprime market where we badly need supervision, a majority of loans are made with very little supervision. It is like a city with a murder law, but no cops on the beat.”

Not surprisingly given the higher degree of supervision, loans made under the CRA program were made in a more responsible way than other subprime loans. CRA loans carried lower rates than other subprime loans and were less likely to end up securitized into the mortgage-backed securities that have caused so many losses, according to a recent study by the law firm Traiger & Hinckley (PDF file here).

Finally, keep in mind that the Bush administration has been weakening CRA enforcement and the law’s reach since the day it took office. The CRA was at its strongest in the 1990s, under the Clinton administration, a period when subprime loans performed quite well. It was only after the Bush administration cut back on CRA enforcement that problems arose, a timing issue which should stop those blaming the law dead in their tracks. The Federal Reserve, too, did nothing but encourage the wild west of lending in recent years. It wasn’t until the middle of 2007 that the Fed decided it was time to crack down on abusive pratices in the subprime lending market. Oops.

Better targets for blame in government circles might be the 2000 law which ensured that credit default swaps would remain unregulated, the SEC’s puzzling 2004 decision to allow the largest brokerage firms to borrow upwards of 30 times their capital and that same agency’s failure to oversee those brokerage firms in subsequent years as many gorged on subprime debt. (Barry Ritholtz had an excellent and more comprehensive survey of how Washington contributed to the crisis in this week’s Barron’s.)

There’s plenty more good reading on the CRA and the subprime crisis out in the blogosphere. Ellen Seidman, who headed the Office of Thrift Supervision in the late 90s, has written several fact-filled posts about the CRA controversey, including one just last week. University of Oregon professor and economist Mark Thoma has also defended the CRA on his blog. I also learned something from a post back in April by Robert Gordon, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which ends with this ditty:

It’s telling that, amid all the recent recriminations, even lenders have not fingered CRA. That’s because CRA didn’t bring about the reckless lending at the heart of the crisis. Just as sub-prime lending was exploding, CRA was losing force and relevance. And the worst offenders, the independent mortgage companies, were never subject to CRA — or any federal regulator. Law didn’t make them lend. The profit motive did. And that is not political correctness. It is correctness.

Do you have a right to a policeman's labor? A detective's labor? A garbage man's labor? A highway workers labor? A public school teacher's labor? A Judge's labor? A librarian's labor? A fireman's labor? A public recreation worker's labor?

Yes uncle buck, I feel I do have a right to a doctor's labor and of course he should be compensated for it.

And in your world if I don't have the money to pay for the doctors labor, what do I do, curl up and die?


We have a family friend, her unemployed 18 year old developed some severe abdominal pain about 6 months ago, requiring him to make a couple trips to the hospital and have some tests done. He has since moved in with his father but DHS came to our friends house to ask why she wasn't paying the 18,000 hospital bill. She doesn't have insurance and the child was 18 at the time and now he is legally bound to pay the bill. DHS got some information and they will apply him to get medicaid coverage and we will all pay, that's the convoluted system we have now. If he's not eligible for medicaid, he'll probably claim bankruptcy, medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy and once again, we will all pay.

Boy, the mandate sounds like a decent idea for now, single payer even better...