A Profile in Political Courage -- Barack Obama and Healthcare

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

We will NOT decrease the percentage of GDP spend on healthcare. We will end up increasing it. Cost savings will qiuckly be offset by calls for broader services. Fat smokers will NOT be denied care but we will have to pay for them. Drug abusers will be rehab'ed ad infinitim (saving 5% on each go around) at the public nickel. Oldsters will consume a grossly disproportionate share of care dollars. The model for us will be medicare/medicaid -- not Euro-health. We will expand that aspect of our health system which functions least effectively -- but most inclusively.

Obama wants a healthier America. He especially wants the poor have nots -- the group for whom he was a political advocate -- to have care as good as anyone else in the country. He believes it is morally wrong for some rich suburban kid of asiatic extraction to have access to a pacemaker paid for by his father's health package while some hispanic lad languishes in the barrio because his hard working parents work two or three jobs each with no benefits and can't afford a glossy health care package. Equality must be of outcome, not opportunity.

I don't see things that way.

I think this shows two typical American fallacies.

1. An severe under appreciation of the extent of European Healthcare provision. Almost all of what you cited as increasing American costs is already included in European State healthcare, there is currently a scandal over the fact that English (but not Welsh or Scotish) pensioners are required to pay for their own care. The assumption is that the English situation should be better, not vice versa, in order to redress the balance.

As another example, my father, a poor 59 year-old bus driver, had his apendix out on Sunday. He is now back resting at home, having payed nothing, and the whole thing was done with no hassle. His only complaint was the food.

2. That the principle of "equality of opertunity" should apply to healthcare when most of those who need it (the young and the old) have no opertunity to ever improve their situation. If I said that "equality of opertunity, not equality of outcome" should apply to policing you would say the system was corrupt; yet you advocate exactly this concept with relation to your nation's basic well-being.

[Centurion1]

We will end up raising taxes in one fashion or another. We can only run in the red for so long before the loans will dry up. Without raising taxes, we cannot maintain our defense spending at superpower levels. Side thought? Why did we spend so little on our war department most of the time, but we spend scads on a defense department? Who ever won a ******* thing on defense anyway (strategically speaking).

are you kidding? There is no longer a "War Department", it was merged from the department of the Navy and the department of the Army as well as the department of the Chair force, excuse me Air Force into the Department of Defense in 1949. Of the department of defense it is made up into two separate major parts, the Department of the Navy and the joint Chiefs of Staff.

Please tell me you were just kidding SF. Please