It's a pure effort in partisanship/private industry lobbying to discredit the issue/plan/president. Right down to the latest approval polls. It's naked spending to stop progress.

If the "other side" were pushing an alternative proposal, that we could compare and contrast, then I'd respect the criticism.

Alas, that's not what politics has been in the Rove era. The Rovian model is not to propose a better solution, but to kick/scream/cheat/insinuate/yell/whatever it takes to attack/discredit your opposition.

We should be debating at least two if not 3 or 4 competing proposals, and whittling it down to the best and most fit. Instead, we just get blogs/talking heads and politicians pushing for face time instead of offering answers.

Artifice.................

There is no problem to be fixed.

(07-24-2009 02:39 PM)Artifice Wrote:  It's a pure effort in partisanship/private industry lobbying to discredit the issue/plan/president. Right down to the latest approval polls. It's naked spending to stop progress.

No one has demonstrated "progress."

Aka Your "reasoning" is flawed.

While I agree the Repubs should have their own plan in the works, there is no way in hell this Democrat Congress or this Democrat President would pass Repub written legislation of this magnitude.

The republicans clearly should have some plan on the table. And it's equally clear that what they tried to sell last year, which seemed to change daily and which McCain himself never really seemed to understand, does not fill the bill.

I personally think they should put forth a variation of the French plan. Basically take the $250 per person per month that employers spend now, and convert that into a government payment for everybody. That buys you a really crappy HMO. You can stick with that and wait in a queue when you actually get sick or injured. You can pay to get to the front of the line. You can buy supplemental insurance that gets you to the front of the line. You can exchange the federal payment for a voucher to use to purchase comprehensive insurance like we have now. Employers can pony up the difference to provide supplemental insurance or a comprhensive plan. You can combine any of these approaches with health spending accounts (which would be perpetual, instead of disappearing at the end of each year). Everybody is covered, and you have some real free market competition for health care beyond that point.

You need more tax revenues to pay for this. But you are relieving employers of the expense of their current health care plans, and in the end that gets this pretty close to revenue neutral.

I will say this in the republicans' favor. What's being proposed now is a really bad program. They don't have to have an alternative to know that this would be a huge mistake. At the same time, they really do need an alternative.

Seems to me they are going to an awful lot of trouble and expence to cover 10 million people.