I just don’t understand. I dont understand how you guys can sit there staring at 787 billion dollar deficit and then want to create another HUGE entitlement program and add more to the debt?

I know in your wildest dreams you believe the democrats are somehow telling the truth when they craft a bill that supposedly will pay for itself thru all these huge savings.

Do you really believe competition is going to lower prices in the health care industry? Do you really believe that Hospitals are going to cut salaries for Nurses? Doctors?

Do you guys really believe this? That by cutting waste from medicare that we are going to have a benefits program that pays for itself?

An example of where Im coming from.

When the world seemed to be melting down…Gasoline dropped to 1.38 per gallon for about 2 weeks. Once the Gasoline industry saw the world wasnt going to implode what is the price of gasoline now a days?

2.30-3.00 per gallon.

In the midst of 10 percent unemployment. A worldwide recession. Economic hardships the gasoline industry is gouging us.

Would competition fix this? It is a commodity….GASOLINE…you can have 10 or 1000 gas stations of which we have a million gas stations and dozens of gas retailers and gasoline is still very high in price.

Health care is a commodity…It is HEALTH…..You can have 10 or 1000 hospitals and your still going to have high prices. No matter how much competition you throw at the health care industry you are going to get the same results we got with falling oil prices.

Right now their is still a huge demand for OIL so the prices remain high. With health care you are going to increase demand and expect prices to fall?

Only in our wildest imaginations friends…Only in Political LA LA Land.

This is the problem. You guys can argue all you want about saving money, cutting medicare or whatever but the facts are simple.

Health care reform means health care for all with the democrats and they do not care what it takes to get that in place.

Without serious overhaul of the system first we are going to just pile more debt on top of more debt. If we create a public option, coops or anything else to do this and then use the wording in almost every bill out there that we the government will fund low incomes up to 4x(four times) the rate of poverty then it become pretty dayum obvious to me that this bill is NOT going to pay for itself.

Especially when next in line will be the president and a democratic congress legalizing 12-20 million illegals who will all fall under the 4x poverty limit levels.

No the beginning point of this debate is…HEALTHCARE for all.

Republicans say reform is good, just healthcare for all is a back breaker.

Democrats say reform is good but what we really mean is healthcare for all and then figure out how to pay for it.

The reason the debate is so contentious is that neither side are on the same page.

Notice however that this isn’t really an “entitlement cut” in any real sense, because the notion is that people in the program will get the same service, providers will just be compensated less. To me, “entitlement cut” sounds like the people enjoying the gov’t financed service will be getting less. That’s not the case with this.

Jeezus…so cutting money out of Medicare and CHIP aren’t entitlement cuts now?

I doubt you’ll get any reasonable Republican lawmaker to admit that they want to get rid of people’s health care. They just want to lower the amount we pay. Sames goes for social security.

#2 OK, your contention is that insuring more people will result in a net savings? Feel free to believe that. I don’t.

#3 I didn’t even know what that meant. On research, this looks like a good idea. The estimate I found is that it could save 60 to 160 billion over 5 years. The annual savings 12-40 million a year won’t get us close to the finish line, though.

I previously spent a half hour doing searches and following links trying to find a single specific explained detail about medicare cuts in Baucus’s bill. I could not find one.

The only accounts I could find previously described decreasing provider payouts. Hopefully that’s unrelated to this bill. Because demanding that providers provide services at rates that make their practices unsustainable won’t solve anything. On looking into the advantage payments, it seems like perhaps there are areas where medicare is overpaying. If that’s really so, that’s worth remedying.

Notice however that this isn’t really an “entitlement cut” in any real sense, because the notion is that people in the program will get the same service, providers will just be compensated less. To me, “entitlement cut” sounds like the people enjoying the gov’t financed service will be getting less. That’s not the case with this.

I don’t see how you can extricate the issues from one another. Let’s just end recission. Ok, well if we don’t want to put the insurance companies to go bankrupt, we have to have a mandate, right? Well, that means either forcing people to pay out of pocket (which I’m sure the 20-30yo crowd who are mostly healthy and not paying for insurance currently will love), or providing some kind of subsidy. In a market with all this new demand, and insufficient competition, prices will shoot up (making those subsidies harder to provide, among other problems), so some kind of mechanism is required to increase competition. Thus the exchange and public option.

How do we fix one piece of this in isolation?

They did this with Immigration and it was shot down by the people… They meaning politicians.

My problem with Health Care reform as dreamed of by the Democrats is this:

Never ever in the history of the world has the US government created an entitlement program that has paid for itself. This health care program will end up being exorbitantly expensive and when its all done and said with we will raise taxes to JUST pay for this while NOT doing anything about the deficit.

So what transpires is the deficits continue to rise….we raise taxes and we still dont fix the deficits.

NOW we have even more deficits to FIX and even less margins to fix them with because we have already raised taxes. In the end we end up with an overburdened society that will be far less inflexible to economic chaos.

Health care will bankrupt this nation if its not done right and the way the dems are approaching it…its not going to be done right.

Number two we’ll save money in Medicare costs. Uninsured folks cost Medicare more when they get into the program because they delay treatment. This way there will be fewer uninsured people. Particularly 64-year-olds, because they are no longer uninsureable with the changes to the individual market.

Number three we’ll save in Medicare advantage payments. We’re talking 11 or 12 figures here alone.

That’s just off the top of my head.

I’m all ears if you can enumerate one or two of these alleged massive cuts to entitlements.

I might undertake to read all 223 pages of the Baucus bill if I thought it was intelligible. But that’s just too long and I’m just too skeptical.

I simply don’t believe that this bill has many ways to actually keep costs down. Too familiar with projections cast by civil service employees named Rose E Scenario. You believe the CBO if you want. I’ll wait for explanations on these alleged savings to emerge. If there are good ideas about how to do this, why haven’t we heard them already?

kranky, you really have to read the Baucus bill. There are many ways to keep costs down and the CBO scored them.

Moreover, I disagree that this approach is counter to what Republicans believe in. It doesn’t raise taxes on hardly anybody, makes massive cuts in entitlement programs and will reduce the budget deficit.

My guess is that the Baucus bill will be amended to include some more things Republicans want, but they’ll still all vote against it. Hope I’m wrong.

So, actually, the left railing against the bipartisan legislation as not pure enough should be an incentive for Republicans to support it so they can show independents that they’re learning from their historic defeat last fall.

Here’s another incentive for the Rs…their ideas get into the most important health care reform legislation in the past 50 years.

I must have missed thr part where this bill decreased gov’t spending and did not raise taxes.

This bill is not being supported by Republicans because it is fundamentally counter to the Republican approach. They really want NO part of the “credit” for passing a bill that increases gov’t involvement in healthcare and raises taxes (sometimes called “changing the tax code” if you are reluctant to call a hike a hike, BTW).

Right or wrong, this is quite plain in their positions.

You continue to operate from the premise that something must be done, which is why the GOP should find compromise attractive. The GOP does not think that something should be done if that something would, in their view, make things worse. I don’t really agree with this view, and the GOP’s lack of substantive concrete ideas is a bit of a disgrace.

But I understand and respect their perspective, which is quite defensible. Raising taxes to pay for more government involvement in healthcare might make things worse in many noticeable ways. Further, there doesn’t seem to be any true substantive mechanism to control costs, and that’s the biggest problem.