[Newsbot]

Filibuster Cartoons
Title: Is there any flavour left? (click to view)
Date: March 19, 2010
This Sunday has been declared D-Day by House Democrats, and is intended to represent the final major push to get President Obama's beleaguered healthcare reform bill through the sausage factory of the legislative process.

It's so hard to follow what is actually in the bill anymore. It literally changes from day to day as Democratic leaders try to water-down and mollify any content that is even slightly controversial in any way to ensure they can scrape together the bare minimum of votes necessary to bumble the thing through Congress.

The Republicans have deemed it a "far-left" bill, but in reality much of the far-left is just as consumed with substantial concerns as the far-right. Notable lefties like Michael Moore and Denis Kucinich have blamed Pelosi and Reid's numerous opportunistic sops to conservative congressmen for destroying any hope of truly progressive reform to the health insurance system, characterizing the ensuring remnants as just a lot of tinkering-around-the-edges band-aid solutions. Yet the righties are so convinced that the very premise of the bill, in any form, represents such a severe existential calamity for the country they won't acknowledge that any progress whatsoever has been made in the last 13 months of debate.

It's entirely possible this bill could ultimately go the way of the failed immigration reform effort of some years back, and end up collapsing under the weight of its own compromise-driven bloat.

The greatest strength of the American political system is the power afforded to each individual member of Congress to influence legislation. It's also the greatest roadblock to achieving sweeping reform of any major social problem... though I guess that can be a strength as well, depending on where you come from.

[Psudo]

That may be the scariest drawing in any of your comics, JJ. When people say "Death panels" they mean panels that would decide whether people live or die, not panels made up of skeletons and zombies.

Health care (and immigration) reform would have a better chance of passing if it were attempted incrementally rather than in one huge bill like this.

[Kjorteo]

That is certainly the most...corpselike depiction of Nancy Pelosi I've yet seen, yes.

I'm not sure how well incremental steps on a system this delicate would work--as they mentioned in the summit, you can't just do the preexisting condition/dropped coverage fix without needing a bigger pool to keep the sick from bankrupting the system, you can't have an individual mandate without some sort of protection and price control for what we're being made to buy (that's where the public option would have been nice,) etc. The end result is still a far cry from perfect, but it's enough of an improvement that I support it, at least....

[Psudo]

How many pages would it take to describe the preexisting condition/dropped coverage fix and the increased pool? That could be one bill.

How many pages would it take to describe the individual mandate and protection/price control system? That could be another bill.

And the sum of those two page counts cannot reasonably be even 10% of the size of the bill being considered. Thus, I estimate this monster bill could be approximately 20 individual bills incrementally altering the American health care system.

FYI, it's been very hard to discuss this point without making further points about how the bill is a terrible idea for people like me (don't have insurance and don't want it).

[Mr_Canada]

Quote:

FYI, it's been very hard to discuss this point without making further points about how the bill is a terrible idea for people like me (don't have insurance and don't want it).

...Why?

[Kjorteo]

Assuming that your estimations are correct in how long a reasonably sized bill should be and how many bills would fit into this one (about which I am not at all certain, but just playing along with the train of thought for now,) if you were break it into 20 bills and consider them one at a time, you'd have a longer period of chaos where provisions go into effect without the prerequisites on which they rely (for example, preexisting condition fix without doing anything to force more healthy people into the pool, which would completely wreck the system) especially if requiring a separate vote on each individual bill leads to some of them not passing. If you introduce all 20 bills at the same time, then you're really not accomplishing anything different than this one bill, except for theatrics (getting to play to the "this bill is over two thousand pages!! (and that is bad)" talking point that Tea Partiers like) and, again, more potential points of failure if each point is considered individually and some pass without their prerequisites.

[Voyager]

Well, as far as I can tell, the current bill still include nice armies of unfunded mandates, an assortment of price controls of all weird flavours and stripes, and take over of student loans, along with a 20% mandated medicare payment cut that congress has no intention of not repealing in a bill immediately following the bill immediately following this one. Oh, and it's supposed to be enforced by the IRS (yes, the same guys that sent a team out to collect 4 cents)

Oh and the thing is 2,700 odd pages long, and no you can't see it. So before you ask, how do I have any idea what is in the bill, I must inquire, how do *you* know what's in the bill? Giving that much paper, one would thing it does *something*, wouldn't you?

[Kjorteo]

Voyager wrote:

Oh and the thing is 2,700 odd pages long, and no you can't see it.

You can't? Last I checked, they had PDFs of the House and Senate versions online.

[Voyager]

Kjorteo wrote:

Voyager wrote:

Oh and the thing is 2,700 odd pages long, and no you can't see it.

You can't? Last I checked, they had PDFs of the House and Senate versions online.

Yea, they went up last night or so. Vote's tomorrow.

You can read 2700 pages in a day?

In fact, just for fun. Is the so called "corn-husker kickback" in the reconciliation bill, and what page is it on.

Also, is there, or is there not a panel for assessing what medications will be permitted to be covered? Where is it in the bill?

Does the army health care (I believe it's called Tricare) meet the minimum requirements to be legal?

Does your health insurance meet the legal guidelines. If not, what will be required of you? Is that true for the Senate bill, the reconciliation bill, or both?

If the reconciliation bill fails, what happens to the senate bill?

[Voyager]

This is about par for the course for this debate. Complain about the bill, and it's supporters are all over you.

Ask said-same supporters "Is X in the bill, and where is it?" All you get are blank stares.

[Kjorteo]

I had (according to the timestamps between your two posts) a little less than 50 minutes to respond to every question you randomly threw out there in your last post or else be deemed as giving blank stares and therefore proving your point? Christ, I was in the shower.

The House and Senate bills have been online since before they even passed (however many months ago those were) and I'm going to make the fairly bold assumption that the compromise bill is actually a compromise between the two. You're pulling things out of thin air and then challenging us to disprove them, which is somewhat dishonest as far as debate tactics go. (Unless you can tell me on exactly what page it says doctors can't vivisect babies to harvest their organs, I'm just going to assume it's in there somewhere and therefore we're all doomed.)

Most of this whole health insurance reform debate is about the lower middle class--people who are barely too rich to qualify for government assistance but still find private insurance to be an absolute fortune (especially with the deductibles and standard rates going up they way they are.) I make $11,000 and am therefore very firmly in the bracket in which I qualify for Medicaid, have been on it for years even without this bill and would continue to be in it under any version of it, and am probably one of the few people here who would therefore be completely unaffected by anything that happens either way. I'm for reform because "gee, I really hope I don't get a raise someday and therefore get bumped out of the poverty bracket and lose my insurance" is a very messed up thought to have. I have a friend who is just barely over the line like that. It's awful.

(Also, you have ten minutes to respond to this or I win by default.)

[Proculation]

Mr_Canada wrote:

Quote:

FYI, it's been very hard to discuss this point without making further points about how the bill is a terrible idea for people like me (don't have insurance and don't want it).

...Why?

A lot of the 40 millions non-insured people in the US are people who chose to not get an healthcare insurance.

Let's say you don't own a car, would you buy an insurance for a car ?
There's a lot of young people like that in the US. They are young and do not see the worth of buying a health insurance. They have good health and they are young. They only take accident insurances.

That's something that should be said more when talking about all those uninsured.

[Kjorteo]

That's not exactly a fair comparison, because you can't just... not own... health. It would be more fair to compare those sorts of people to people who have a car and drive but don't have insurance. Even though it's illegal (auto insurance is an area in which the individual mandate has already taken hold) there are enough people who break the law and drive without insurance anyway that there is quite often an uninsured motorist clause in auto insurance (so if you get in a wreck with someone who is uninsured and they're at fault but can't pay, the insurance steps in because someone has to.) You know what's even less fair than being required by law to have insurance for something? Being required by law to have insurance for something and pay for other people who don't, at the same time.

And since doctors don't just turn people away if they show up at the emergency room close to death but lacking insurance (and those doctors still need to be paid for their time and services) and that just hits the system in general as well, yes, people with health insurance currently are being hit by the treatment for people without.

[Psudo]

Mr_Canada wrote:

Quote:

FYI, it's been very hard to discuss this point without making further points about how the bill is a terrible idea for people like me (don't have insurance and don't want it).

...Why?

Why which? Why don't I want insurance, or why is it hard for one without insurance to criticize an individual mandate? I'd think the latter would be obvious, but if not consider Kjorteo's advocacy that congress "force more healthy people into the pool". Why do I deserve force?

As to the former, I've never been seriously ill or injured and only had colds/the flu twice in the past 5 years (I missed a day and a half of work total). It's not a significant enough problem in my life for me to throw money at beyond the occasional bottle of NyQuil, which I prefer to pay for out-of-pocket.

Kjorteo wrote:

Assuming that your estimations are correct [...] you'd have a longer period of chaos where provisions go into effect without the prerequisites on which they rely

I intentionally gave specific examples wherein specific statues are passed with their prerequisites included. My complaint is passing 20 separate ideas (prerequisites included) as one composite bill.

Voyager wrote:

Ask said-same supporters "Is X in the bill, and where is it?" All you get are blank stares.

You gave 47 minutes for someone to respond when the average response time in this thread is more than three hours. That's just stupid.

Kjorteo wrote:

That's not exactly a fair comparison, because you can't just... not own... health.

You can be free of health expenses, though. Not having a car means no auto expenses, and having good health means no health expenses. He should have made the distinction more clear, but the comparison is valid.

Kjorteo wrote:

You know what's even less fair than being required by law to have insurance for something? Being required by law to have insurance for something and pay for other people who don't, at the same time.

Uh... under the proposed health care bill, I'd be required to have insurance for something that will only ever be used to pay for other people. Isn't that the same as your last sentence?

[N_Fiddledog]

Oh well, at least it looks like the Dems backed down on "Deem and Pass".

Quote:

So what does this mean? Hard to say. It could be that the heat on Democrats for using DemonPass made it too difficult to hold onto votes; Pelosi may have calculated that she’d net more votes if she split the bills properly. On the other hand, it could also mean that Pelosi has all the votes she needs and no longer needs the self-executing rule to get the bill out of the House.

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/03/20/b ... -and-pass/

I always preferred ideas like those of Paul Ryan for American health care reform myself. They were intriguing.